page_title: ASCII art
section_title: "Block ASCII" / "High ASCII" style ASCII art on the IBM PC
hierarchical_section_title: ASCII art / Types and styles / Styles of the computer underground text art scene / "Block ASCII" / "High ASCII" style ASCII art on the IBM PC
caption_attribution_description: Delusion ASCII by Roy/SAC (me). Demonstrating the difference between "Block" ASCII Look and Feel when displayed with Windows Notepad and Font "Terminal" and ACIDView for Windows which uses real MS DOS Emulation. Replacement for en:Image:ASCII notepad acidview compare.gif
context_page_description: ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters. The term is also loosely used to refer to text based visual art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font such as Courier for presentation.
  Among the oldest known examples of ASCII art are the
  creations by computer-art pioneer Kenneth Knowlton from around 1966, who was working for Bell Labs at the time. "Studies in Perception I" by Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon from 1966 shows some examples of their early ASCII art.
  ASCII art was invented, in large part, because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks.
context_section_description: So-called "block ASCII" or "high ASCII" uses the extended characters of the 8-bit code page 437, which is a proprietary standard introduced by IBM in 1979 (ANSI Standard x3.16) for the IBM PC DOS and MS-DOS operating systems. "Block ASCIIs" were widely used on the PC during the 1990s until the Internet replaced BBSes as the main communication platform. Until then, "block ASCIIs" dominated the PC Text Art Scene.
  The first art scene group that focused on the extended character set of the PC in their art work was called "Aces of ANSI Art" (<A.A.A>). Some members left in 1990, and formed a group called "ANSI Creators in Demand" (ACiD). In that same year the second major underground art scene group was founded, ICE, "Insane Creators Enterprise".
  There is some debate between ASCII and block ASCII artist, with "Hardcore" ASCII artists maintaining that block ASCII art is in fact not ANSI art, because it does not use the 128 characters of the original ASCII standard. On the other hand, block ASCII artists argue that if their art uses only characters of the computers character set, then it is to be called ASCII, regardless if the character set is proprietary or not.
  Microsoft Windows does not support the ANSI Standard x3.16. One can view block ASCIIs with a text editor using the font "Terminal", but it will not look exactly as it was intended by the artist. With a special ASCII/ANSI viewer, such as ACiDView for Windows (see ASCII and ANSI art viewers), one can see block ASCII and ANSI files properly. An example that illustrates the difference in appearance is part of this article. Alternatively, one could look at the file using the TYPE command in the command prompt.
caption: Block ASCII display via Notepad versus ACiDView for Windows
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