Poets and novelists turn words into pictures. But on the Internet, the world-spanning computer network, a group of people is taking this idea a bit further. They are ASCII artists, devoted to taking ...

My first real computer, an Amstrad CPC464, came with the robust Locomotive Basic in ROM, allowing the user to easily hack the hardware ASCII character set. This was awesome: all you had to do assign ...

There's an old engineering joke that says: “Standards are great … everyone should have one!” The problem is that – very often – everyone does. Consider the case of storing textual data inside a ...