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ASCII Fun is where text gets playful. Browse fun facts, jokes, and odd ASCII curiosities you can enjoy in seconds.
    _    ____   ____ ___ ___   _____            
   / \  / ___| / ___|_ _|_ _| |  ___|   _ _ __  
  / _ \ \___ \| |    | | | |  | |_ | | | | '_ \ 
 / ___ \ ___) | |___ | | | |  |  _|| |_| | | | |
/_/   \_\____/ \____|___|___| |_|   \__,_|_| |_|
ASCII Fun
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ASCII Fun

. Discover fun facts, jokes, and weird ASCII curiosities inspired by ASCII art, classic terminals, and text-based creativity. Perfect for quick laughs, retro inspiration, and shareable text mode trivia.

Fun Facts About ASCII Art

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Born in 1963

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was first published in 1963, making it over 60 years old!

128 Characters

The original ASCII standard defines exactly 128 characters, including 95 printable characters and 33 control codes.

Star Wars in ASCII

The entire Star Wars Episode IV movie has been recreated in ASCII animation. You can watch it by typing telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl in your terminal!

First Emoticon

The emoticon :-) was first used in 1982 by computer scientist Scott Fahlman to indicate jokes in online messages.

Pronunciation

The word "ASCII" is pronounced "ASK-ee", not "A-S-C-I-I".

Copy/Paste Is a Modern Luxury

In many old systems, moving ASCII art around wasn’t as simple as selecting and pasting. People learned careful spacing, alignment, and manual edits like true text artisans.
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ASCII Jokes

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There are only 10 kinds of people in this world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.
ASCII no stupid questions and I'll give you no stupid ANSIers

Does anyone know of a good character encoding standard that I can give to someone I care about?

ASCII for a friend.

I almost bought a huge library out of old computer programming books...

...but the ascii price was way too high.
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Weird & Wonderful

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Weird & Wonderful #1: The accidental hero

The @ symbol became the default player character in roguelike games simply because it looked like “a person” on text-only screens.
@
Referens: Rogue (1980), NetHack, early roguelike design notes

Weird & Wonderful #2: The Shading Ramp

Early terminal artists realized that some characters looked darker simply because they filled more space. By lining them up from light to heavy, they turned plain text into clever shading and made pictures appear where no real graphics existed.
.:-=+*#%@
Referens: Image-to-ASCII converters, early BBS art

Weird & Wonderful #4: Why terminals loved ALL CAPS

Many early terminals didn’t support lowercase letters at all, which is why early computer output often looks like it’s shouting.
WELCOME TO THE SYSTEM
ENTER COMMAND:
Referens: Early teleprinters, ASR-33 Teletype

Weird & Wonderful #5: Fake graphics before pixels

Before bitmap graphics were common, developers used box-drawing characters to simulate windows and UI layouts.
┌──────────┐
│  MENU    │
│  START   │
│  EXIT    │
└──────────┘
Referens: IBM PC Code Page 437, DOS UI design
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Popular ASCII Art Styles

Line Art

Uses characters like / \ | - _ = to create outlines and simple shapes.

Solid Art

Fills areas with dense characters like @ # M W to create shading effects.

Block Art

Uses block characters and extended ASCII to create pixel-like graphics.