Love is a Wet Puppy Dog

Sad but true: I have worked in and around IT for over 30 years. My first direct 'hands on' contact with a computer was at the Science Museum in about 1975. A new exhibition on computing had opened (parts of which still remain I believe) and the two exhibits I remember in particular were a terminal that ran a 'learning' guessing game and a 'digital' camera.

The game was very basic: you thought of an animal, and the computer would 'ask' questions until it either guessed it correctly or failed. If you beat the computer, it would ask you for question that could be used to correctly identify the animal another time. There is a far more sophisticated online version of the game called 20Q that has been played over 50 million times (Wiki entry here). My cousin bought me a handheld version for my birthday a couple of years ago, as she remembered going to the exhibition with me a couple of years later.

The digital camera was even more basic - well by today's standards. I think may parents paid 50p, and I was sat in front of a television camera. A few moments later, a dot matrix printer sprang into life, and a black and white print of my face began to emerge, composed of both ASCII characters and more solid graphic blocks. It was certainly recognisable as me, although it was a few years away from being a useful photographic tool.

I was trying to find an example of what they looked like without success. However, I did stumble upon a couple of similar examples that both predated and followed my own portrait. The contemporary example is a textportrait , although perhaps it uses the text as more of a mask than as a medium. You may have also come across meta images or photographic mosaics, where single images are made up of hundreds of smaller pixel-like elements. The other example actually dates back to 1969, and is probably recognisable to anyone who worked in an IBM environment, typically banks. I used to have a Snoopy calendar on my desk for years...

I found a link on the photographic mosaic wiki page to ASCII art which is close to my portrait but probably closer to the Snoopy above. Like so many web explorations, it seems that ASCII art is part of an even bigger Computer art scene that dates back for decades. If I come across an example that more closely resembles the picture I had taken, I'll post it.

And remember - although technology has moved on somewhat, there is a little bit of ASCII art in everyone =8-)X