ASCII Adopted as Standard

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was adopted as a standard in 1963. This code is a character encoding system that assigns unique numbers to represent each letter and character of the alphabet. ASCII has played a significant role in both computer and digital art. In computer art, ASCII characters have been used to create images, designs, and animations, with artists utilizing the unique visual properties of ASCII characters to create often abstract works. Well known examples include Kenneth Knowlton and Leon Harmon’s Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I) (1966) and Vuk Ćosić’s Deep ASCII (1998). In digital art, ASCII has been used as a tool for text-based art with artists using characters to create intricate typographic compositions and designs. Overall, ASCII has provided artists with a powerful tool for creating digital works that are both visually unique and highly flexible. In terms of its importance at the time, ASCII allowed computers to communicate with each other in a standardized way, regardless of manufacturer or operating system. This meant that data could be easily transferred between different computers and devices, which helped to facilitate the growth of the digital age.