A contributing factor to the relative popularity of ASCII porn in its time was high compatibility: the standard ASCIIcharacter set could be displayed on most computer monitors, even on early desktops/terminals incapable of displaying digital images,[4] and could be printed on most printers.[5] Additionally, ASCII porn could be composed by hand using nothing more than a text editor, without the need for a model or camera. As computers developed, it became possible to transmit digital images on the World-Wide Web, and thus ASCII porn slipped into obscurity.[6]
Artists in the late 1990s returned to the form, for instance in the work Deep ASCII, a rendering of the movie Deep Throat, created by Vuk Ćosić of the ASCII Art Ensemble.[1]Concrete poet Florian Cramer also produced ASCII work based on sexually explicit images.[7]
^such as for instance original IBM PCs with MDA cards
^Many early computer printers were either incapable of printing graphical images or required custom software support in every program to do so, which was not always implemented.