Predates the internet, just like me. My mom was a high school math teacher, and was taking a COBOL class for her Masters at Hofstra University in 1977. I’m certain it was ‘77 because the Commodore PET had just released and she had one on home-loan that summer. One of my earliest memories is visiting the mainframe room, probably age 6-7, where the bearded sysadmin used a teletypewriter to print me a giant ascii art picture of Snoopy, standing in profile, on a green and white striped, tractor-fed paper. I’m sure the sysadmin had other interesting ascii art that was not appropriate to share with 7 year old.
Old man story over, but holy F, Hofstra is still teaching COBOL, wow?
> An ASCII artist who goes by the screen name “goto80” told me in an email that, according to his research, the first modern text-based porn was probably sent via teletext. Teletext was a late 70s pre-internet technology for sending text and graphics to a television set, that never quite took off in the way people thought it would at the time.
Also, I have seen ascii art on telex-type machines. These are limited by using only five bits, and so you can only use lowercase characters (or uppercase, but not both).
ARPANET was established in 1969. In 1966 Ken Knowles at Bell Labs created the "Computer Nude" which "by scanning a photograph with a camera and converting the analog voltages to binary numbers, which were assigned typographic symbols based on halftone densities. It was printed in The New York Times on October 11, 1967". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Knowlton
Old man story over, but holy F, Hofstra is still teaching COBOL, wow?
https://www.hofstra.edu/academics/ce/professionaldevelopment...