I already wrote about how my typing teacher, Mrs. Cohen, was a genius for telling us (in 1983) that we needed to learn how to type to work with computers. Another thing she did was have us make pictures by typing. She’d read out of a book with instructions: “10 spaces”, “2 semi colons”, “30 periods”, “4 dollar signs”, etc, etc. It would take the whole class and then we’d get a picture of JFK.

This came to mind yesterday after I started a new meetup group for Sarasota Software Developers, and I had to come up with a banner image for the page. I was just going to use a photo of a sunrise with some palm trees, which definitely reads as “Sarasota”, but I also wanted it have some element of “Software Developer” in it. I was going to composite something together, but then I thought that someone must have made some kind of ASCII art generator. I was right.

I tried a bunch, and this one is the best: https://www.ascii-art-generator.org

Here’s what I made with it:

It would have taken forever to type it out.