ASCII

It's funny how little artifacts of the Digital Age affect our lives. The venerable American Standard Code for Information Interchange received its last revision in 1986. It is a simple code, with 128 characters in it: 33 control characters which are non-printing, the 'Space' character (ASCII 32 or HEX 20) which is technically printing but leaves no trace, and 94 printable symbols. The codes are designed to fit a scheme using binary numbers 0000000 to 1111111 (zero to 127), with an extra bit (or binary digit) used for various other purposes.

ASCII was really conceived in 1960. Since then, generations of programmers have grown up having fun with the 128 characters, many of which we have come to know and love like close friends. You can find a family photograph here.

For a long while, these were the only characters anyone ever used in computer games, computer graphics, and other kinds of interesting stuff. A lot of the graphics constructed with letters are beautiful works of art, making use of the relative density and ink distribution in each character to act as shaded blocks of monochromatic tint. You can find some of it here, and at various archival websites. (For many years, I used an ASCII wolfshead as my signature.)

Recently, I rediscovered the pleasures of ASCII and ASCII art when I took a long-delayed break to play a game called Dwarf Fortress. I'd long abandoned such games, which are called 'Rogue-like' games after a particularly seminal example of the genre. But I found myself enthralled by the terrible little graphic sprites, remembering through a mist of nostalgia all the times I had in the old computer labs of my past.