Discover surprising twists and oddities from the world of ASCII and terminals
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Welcome to
Weird & Wonderful
! Discover surprising twists and oddities from the world of ASCII, terminals, and text-based computing. Each entry comes with a tiny example to illustrate the idea.Weird & Wonderful
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
Weird & Wonderful #3: Deleting by making more holes
ASCII includes a character called DEL (127). On paper tape, you couldn’t erase holes - so “deleting” meant punching all holes in a character.
DEL = 127
Referens: ASCII history, paper tape encoding