An article about how text art used to be done back in 1948:

Seeing a TV show as a child, where Rolf Harris was shown how to do something similar to that flower, is what got me started on this whole ASCII art thing.
Thanks to Sah War we now have a translation file for Bulgarian (Apologies about taking so long to upload it).
There are some spacing issues which I will resolve in the next version.
If things work out there may be something special released before Christmas. It’s not a new version (~mid January), it’s a separate but related little program which I’ve been planning for a few days. The prototype isn’t finished, so if it’s a horrible failure then we will say no more about it.