Friday, February 13, 2009

Fun on Friday #19: ASCII Art

When I first started learning about computers, ASCII Art (i.e. pictures made up of letters, numbers, punctuation marks, etc.) was the type of computer art you saw in every school computer lab. The technology may have moved on with lifelike CGI appearing everywhere... but I think there is still a certain something about this kind of picture.


323/365: ASCII Colin
Originally uploaded by DavidDMuir
The illustration here was produced at the Online Poster Maker site which makes it easy to produce giant posters from photographs. All sort of possibilities for schools I would think from wall displays to fund raising. ...Or you could do it just for fun. :-)

A similar site is The Rasterbator which does the same kind of thing but with different sized dots (and different coloured dots too if you want) instead of ASCII charactes.

I hope you have fun playing. If you use either of these sites, post a link to a picture of your creation.

And while we are on ASCII art, what about the world's first music video in a spreadsheet! Yes... a spreadsheet. For reasons best known to themselves, AC/DC's record company have created an ASCII version of their Rock N Roll Train video and released it as a spreadsheet! Let me know what you think.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think AC'DC did this as they are aware of the potential research project you proposed a couple of months ago. An excel spreadsheet is of course, easy to include as a part of any initial proposal document and final research paper....

A cunning plan, methinks !

David said...

Hello mimanifesto

Ah! Of course. It's such a genius idea to do this research I can't understand why people are not queuing up to throw money at it. You are absolutely right - the video in a spreadsheet is just what's needed to tip the balance.

Col said...

My personal favourite example of ASCII art comes from the days before PCs.... You could "send" a particular file to some other user, it would lock the monitor and display the contents of the file, scrolling until it was finished. My top pick was a file called "rocket" which blanked the screen before a 14 foot long multicoloured ASCII rocket scrolled upwards on a pyre of smoke and flames, followed by the message "You're fired!"

David said...

Now that would have been worth seeing!