(Untitled)

[ktron]

heather ordered me to post this when i showed her.

i was reading along in f. scott fitzgerald's the beautiful and the damned when i ran across this

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[dap6000]

i just shared this in a webCT discussion in one of my classes in the masters of arts in communication and technology program here at the university of alberta. we were just talking about things like telegraph operators figuring out a way to play chess with each other so the roots of stuff like "online gaming" go back much further than most people realize.

ASCII art and its predecessors

[flyinhome]

I had an amateur radio license back in 1979 or so. It was common at the time for hams to send messages to each other using antiquated teletype equipment. They would also send "artwork" to one another consisting of characters that could be printed on the teletypes - basically upper case letters, digits, and a few special characters.

Also, in the days when punched cards were used (and punched cards predate computers by several decades), it was possible to store "artwork" on a card deck, which could then be printed at will. When computers started to have remote job entry one way to pull a prank was to cause some embarrassing or annoying artwork to be printed out at a remote printer.

(though I'm not sure either of these goes back as far as 1921)