ascii

Created in April 2001 the pixel2ascii application converted pixel-based images to ascii text.

Written in Perl back when that was a server-side language people used, I made this tool freely available online – so anybody could upload any image, enter a character set to use as the grayscale range to replace the pixels and then publish their new ASCII image in an online gallery.

After an initial flurry of interesting pictures, the site soon settled down to accommodate exactly the type of images you would expect people to upload. Certainly Not Safe For Work in their original pixel form, but perhaps still interesting in ASCII if you took a step back and crossed your eyes a little…

The Perl script was 100% unsafe compared to today’s standards, and I’m surprised the pixel2ascii converter lasted as long as it did. I have a copy of all the ascii images in a database, however, and will at some point attempt to extract some images from it for display here.