ASCII - A love of technology

Intro

This post is 100% power up.

I grew up with somewhat of a limited access to what people my age would consider technology. Living in central america ( Belize to be exact ) from when I was about the age of seven until around sixteen. I was born in 1985 so the time I spent in Belize which is a third world country. Most my age would likely have had access to some form of gaming console.

I had my 486 which my Dad helped me build when I was around eleven years old. I installed redhat onto it and would spend most of my time playing a game called Cybersphere.

Cybersphere is actually still running to this day but the reason I loved it so much then was that it was like reading my books but with the added depth of being fully interactive. Cybersphere is what is referred to as a MUSH that is a multi user shared hallucination all conferred in text specifically through a beefed out telnet client.

My tastes in telnet games eventually grew and somewhat broadened. I still play a couple from time to time. One of the most fantastic ideas in my mind in relation to these games however was and remains ASCII art. One of the earliest to my knowledge at least to play with this idea in any real depth was Nethack which would render maps for your roguelike adventure graphically using only the ASCII character set.

Simplicity

Why the ASCII character set you ask? Why not voxels? or html? or any other form that we use to communicate from pictograms to the english written language to sanscrit...

Simplicity, ASCII to my knowledge is the closest human usable form to binary, the one and the zero that make up our technological leaps into the digital age. ASCII was first ratified in 1963 and is an adaptation from telegraph code.

Source

With ASCII I not only have the ability to write any character (almost) within the english language, I can also use these character to represent things that they look like. The emoji for the example is a deeply watered down derivation of ASCII art i.e. ---> :P the cologne and capital P when flipped 90 degrees clock wise resemble a face with its tongue out and is now used to communicate any number of different emotions although most commonly to communicate a sense of amusement.

Source
Fantastic creations can be made with this medium and I feel to this day that it has not felt the true limits of its possibilities.

Follow for more like this next time I will be talking about ANSI!