Question about ASCII art

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Tue May 23 22:29:15 2000

At 05:22 PM 5/23/00 -0700, Sellam "speculum.com" wrote:
>I was mostly referring to the ones done in the days before high-powered
>workstations like SGI systems, where a feat such as scanning in a nekkid
>lady would actually have been pushing the technological boundaries, not
>just mocking them :)

Joan Stark's page delves into a bit of history about this, talking
about pre-computer artists who eyeballed images on typewriters.
Greybeards on the Greenkeys list say that many of their images
were created the same way. This seems considerably more difficult
to me than using a typewriter. The teletype doesn't have the
same freeform flexibility in two dimensions for positioning,
not to mention the lack of a true erase. Lacking a scanner
and driven to distraction by 24-hour turnaround on batch jobs,
I'm sure many were crafted by hand. The images created by
scanner (of whatever technology) have an obviously different
feel to them compared to the hand-generated ones. I'd say that
most of the Playboy centerfolds were done by hand. Think about it:
it wouldn't be all that hard to draw a grid of 80 or 160 cells
over an image that size and eye-ball a grey value for each cell.

I have a delightful donation to my computer museum from an old RTTY
guy who sent original 50-year-old print-outs and tapes of old images.

- John
Received on Tue May 23 2000 - 22:29:15 BST