The Lost Art of Text: A History of ASCII

Long before we had AI image generators (ironic, I know), and even before we had MS Paint, humans were trying to draw pictures with text.

It started with typewriters. In 1898, a woman named Flora Stacey created a butterfly drawing entirely out of typed characters. It wasn’t called “ASCII art” then—it was “Typewriter Art.” But the spirit was the same: using the limited tools at hand to create something beautiful.

The BBS Era

Fast forward to the 1970s and 80s. The internet wasn’t the graphical web we know today. It was a network of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).

If you wanted to show off, you couldn’t upload a JPEG. Bandwidth was measured in bits, not megabits. So, users created elaborate logos and headers using standard ASCII characters. This was the golden age of “ANSI art” (which added color codes) and ASCII.

There was a certain underground cool factor to it. If you logged into a BBS and saw a massive, fiery dragon rendered in text, you knew you were in a serious place.

Why It Still Matters

In a world of 4K displays, why do we still care about ASCII?

1. Portability: ASCII art works everywhere. Terminal, notepad, email source code, ancient hardware. It is the cockroach of digital art—it survives everything.
2. Identity: For developers, putting an ASCII logo in your code’s comments or your CLI tool’s startup screen is a badge of honor. It says, “I care about the details.”
3. Aesthetic: It looks cool. It’s cyberpunk. It’s retro. It feels “hacker-y.”

Conclusion

So next time you use our generator, remember: you aren’t just converting pixels to text. You’re participating in a digital art tradition that spans over a century.

Keep the text alive.