ASCII art

ASCII art is an artistic medium that relies primarily on computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable characters defined by ASCII. The term is also loosely used to refer to text based art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, like on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.
One of the main reasons ASCII art was born was because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks. Also, to mark divisions between different print jobs from different users, bulk printers often used ASCII art to print large banners to make the division between print jobs easier to spot so that the results could be more easily separated by a computer operator or clerk.