ASCII art
Pictures built from the printable ASCII characters — from lineprinter pin-ups to Usenet signatures and NFO files.
With just the ninety-odd printable characters of ASCII you can render anything from a simple smiley to a detailed portrait, letting the density of the glyphs stand in for greyscale. The form predates the home computer — lineprinters and teletypes were already used for character art — but flourished on text terminals, in Usenet signatures and as logos in the scene's NFO files.
Unlike ANSI art, ASCII art uses neither colour nor block graphics, only what fits in plain text, which makes it portable anywhere characters can be shown. Tools like FIGlet turned the big banner headline into a one-line command.