ASCII art

ASCII art is a graphic design technique that utilizes computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text based art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, like on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.
Among the oldest known examples of ASCII art are the creations by computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton from around 1966, who was working for Bell Labs at the time. "Studies in Perception I" by Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon from 1966 shows some examples of their early ASCII art.
One of the main reasons ASCII art was born was because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks. Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banners, making the division easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk.

History
Typewriter art
Since 1867 typewriters have been used for creating visual art. The oldest known preserved example of typewriter art is a picture of a butterfly made in 1898 by a woman named Flora Stacey.
In the 1954 short film Stamp Day for Superman, typewriter art was a feature of the plot.

TTY and RTTY
TTY stands for "TeleTYpe" or "TeleTYpewriter" and is also known as Teleprinter or Teletype. RTTY stands for Radioteletype. According to a chapter in the "RTTY Handbook", text images have been sent via teletypewriter as early as 1923. However, none of the "old" RTTY art has been discovered yet. What is known is the fact that text images appeared frequently on radio teletype in the 1960s and the 1970s.

ASCII art

There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126.
The widespread usage of ASCII art can be traced to the computer bulletin board systems of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The limitations of computers of that time period necessitated the use of text characters to represent images. Along with ASCII's use in communication, however, it also began to appear in the underground online art groups of the period. An ASCII comic is a form of webcomic which uses ASCII text to create images. In place of images in a regular comic, ASCII art is used, with the text or dialog usually placed underneath.
During the 1990s, graphical browsing and variable-width fonts became increasingly popular, leading to a decline in ASCII art. Despite this, ASCII art continued to survive through online MUDs (textual multiplayer roleplaying games), Internet Relay Chat, E-mail, message boards and other forms of online communication which commonly employ the needed fixed-width.
Over the years, warez groups began to get into the ASCII art scene. Warez groups usually release .nfo files with their software, cracks or general illegal software reverse-engineering releases. The ASCII art will usually include the warez group's name and maybe some ASCII borders on the outsides of the release notes, etc.

Emoticons and verticons
Main article: Emoticon
The simplest forms of ASCII art are combinations of two or three characters for expressing emotion in text. They are commonly referred to as 'emoticon', 'smilie', or 'smiley'.
There is another type of one-line ASCII art that does not require the mental rotation of pictures, which is widely known in Japan as kaomoji (literally "face characters".) Traditionally, they are referred to as "ASCII face ". Today, some call them "verticons"[11].
More complex examples use several lines of text to draw large symbols or more complex figures.

List of some popular smileys
Main article: List of common emoticons
The list only shows some popular examples for demonstration purposes. Hundreds of different text smileys were developed over time, but only a few were generally accepted, used and understood.

Icon Meaning

:) classic smile
:') happy crying
:( classic sad
:-o yawn
:-) smile
:D laughter
>:) evil grin
%( confused
:B buck-tooth
B) smiley with glasses
:-# with braces
:@ scream
:P tongue sticking out (silly)
>:@ angry
:/ or :\ indifferent
:-0 yell, surprised
;) winking smile
(:D gossip, blabbermouth
/:) one eyebrow raised
8) Cool
XD Hard laugh
:-& tongue tied
0:) Angel

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http://www.ascii-art.de/ascii/index2.shtml

http://www.xs4all.nl/~svzanten/ascii/index.html