ASCII

From OLSEncyclopedia

ASCII is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII defines a set of 256 characters (letters, numbers, punctuation, etc.) for use on computers, the first 31 of which are "control" characters that have special meanings rather than being an actual printable character. Examples include backspace (ASCII 8), tab (ASCII 9), line feed (ASCII 10), and carriage return (ASCII 13). It's been obsoleted by Unicode, which has support for many more foreign languages since it has a much larger character set. Unicode has the full 256 character ASCII character set as its first 256 characters, for backwards compatibility.

People often like to draw pictures using text characters. This is often referred to as ASCII art. Just like the character set it's based on, ASCII art has been pretty much replaced by Unicode art. Since Unicode has so many more characters available, text artists can make more complex art.