I can remember the 1970's, when computers were things you knew existed, but obviously had never seen outside of TV documentaries. Computers were room-filling monstrosities that scientists and huge corporations used. They were operated by feeding punch-cards into them, and I'm not sure why we even bothered. There were probably a dozen people in the world with an email address, and the most advanced video outputs displayed 80-character columns of text, so you couldn't display a pornographic jpeg even if jpegs existed! Christ, the phrase "modern conveniences" referred to things like transistor radios and flush toilets.

So it is with great clarity that I recall the day my father came home from work with a piece of computer-generated art.

What he presented to me, printed on an off-white, perforated, tractor-fed sheet of paper, was a crude likeness of Snoopy -- flying on his dog house, in pursuit of the Red Baron -- rendered entirely out of letters and numbers, and produced on a 9-pin dot-matrix printer. It was the first time I'd ever seen "ASCII Art," which ruled for years as the pinnacle of artistic expression in the digital realm.

In hindsight, of course, we can see that most ASCII Art was really, really bad. And the sorry bullshit that passed for porn makes me want to cry sometimes.

Thankfully, we now have full-color, high-resolution displays with which to view porn and play solitaire. ASCII Art is pretty much dead.

Or is it?

Here's a curious example of an attempt to drag ASCII Art into the 21st century. It's a collection of ASCII movies, which I must admit are very clever. I still think they're an evolutionary dead end in the big scheme of things, but I gotta give 'em their props for pushing the ASCII envelope.

ASCII Movies