Roy of Superior Art Creations

I put up last year a collection of 100 ASCII Art pictures that have nude girls as motive. Most of them originate from the pre-computer/ASCII art era, when teletype and its text art, RTTY art (pronounced “ritty”), where predominant and popular among hobby ham radio operators. Some of them are even older than that and might even date back to the time of keyboard art.

After I watched once more the video of RaD Man/ACiD and his presentation at the Assembly 2004 demo party in Helsinki, Finland about the history of text art where he showed an example of nude teletype text art and then the original centerfold photograph from Playboy Magazine, I started doing some digging myself. So credits for the initiator and cause of this must go to him :).

As of today (update 08/2009), I was able to find the original photograph for 29 30 40 50 of the 100 ASCII nude images from my collection. I wanted to integrate them somehow into that page, but could not figure out a good way to do it yet. Big thanks to Brian who helped identifying a number of the latest additions and posted his findings at my blog, where I am asking for help with this.

To avoid holding things back forever, I decided now to write a blog post about it and show my findings that way.

I will show the original photographs of the old Playboy Magazine Issues next to the Image of the ASCII art version of it. I converted the original text images to PNG, because it makes it easier for this purpose. You can still find the originals in my collection to verify that those pictures really originate from text and are not some kind of Photoshop trick or something like that. I also flipped some of the ASCII images, if the centerfold was in landscape format instead of the usual “letter” style format.

I also was concerned about copyright issues that this might cause with Playboy Magazine, but old school RTTY (teletype) enthusiast and collector of teletype text art, John Sheetz (K2AGI), mentioned in an interview for the BBS Documentary with Jason Scott Sadofsky that Playboy Magazine actually embraced this stuff and even published one of Don Royer’s (WA6PIR) centerfold creations in text in one of their print issues.

I hope that Playboy still has this attitude today and will see this publication as free promotion and advertisement for their current print magazine.

I found out during my research that there are sometimes multiple ASCII art versions of the same photograph, which is pretty interesting, because it shows the different styles and quality of the text artists who created those ASCII images. Let’s get started! Click the thumbnails to watch the larger versions of the images below.

The Link of the thumbnail version of the ASCII links to the PNG image version of the ASCII. I added links to the original ASCII text files below each ASCII thumbnail. I also added a link there to an image where it shows the photograph and the ASCII side by side (JPG). Please note that the ???side by side??? images are not proportional to the originals they are merely meant for illustration purposes.

The Centerfold Miss March 1964, Nancy Scott, for example was used for three ASCII images in my collection.

	original ASCII – side by side	org ASCII – side-by-side	org ASCII – side-by-side

Miss May 1970, Jennifer Liano was used for two ASCII images. One of them used the wrong name for the girl and called it “Kathy” instead of “Jennifer”.

	original ASCII – side by side	original ASCII – side by side

Miss January 1970, Jill Taylor

	original ASCII – side by side	original ASCII – side by side

Miss February 1969, Lorrie Menconi

	original ASCII – side by side	original ASCII – side by side

Miss October 1964 – Rosemarie Hillcrest

Noticed that the two ASCII images are a ???mirror??? of the photograph? This cannot be coincidence. I assume that there is another photograph that is virtually the same, but matching the pose in the ASCIIs. I had the same with the image of Marianne Gravatte. The used photograph was a mirror of the widely popular centerfold picture, but I was able to dig up the not so popular photograph. I hope that I will find the one for Rosemarie Hillcrest too. However, I decided to show them, even though it is not EXACTLY the source photograph, but it is coming close enough to it for all intents and purposes here :).

	original ASCII – side by side	original ASCII – side by side

Now the single match gallery for the cases where I only have one ASCII matching one original photographs.

Miss January 1966, Judy Tyler original ASCII – side by side	Miss December 1966, Susan Bernard original ASCII – side by side	Miss November 1968, Paige Young original ASCII – side by side
Miss December 1968, Cynthia Myers original ASCII – side by side	Miss October 1969, Jean Bell original ASCII – side by side	Miss November 1969, Claudia Jennings original ASCII – side by side
Miss October 1970, Mary & Madeleine Collinson original ASCII – side by side	Miss October 1971, Claire Rambeau original ASCII – side by side	Miss March 1972, Ellen Michaels original ASCII – side by side
Miss January 1973, Miki Garcia original ASCII – side by side	Miss December 1973, Christine Maddox original ASCII – side by side	Miss April 1978, Pamela Jean Bryant original ASCII – side by side
Miss July 1978, Karen Morton original ASCII – side by side	Miss January 1980, Gig Gangel original ASCII – side by side	Miss July 1980, Teri Peterson original ASCII – side by side
Miss August 1982, Cathy St. George original ASCII – side by side	Miss July 1983, Ruth Guerri original ASCII – side by side	Miss March 1984, Dona Speir original ASCII – side by side
Miss April 1984, Lesa Ann Pedriana original ASCII – side by side	Miss June 1984, Tricia Lange original ASCII – side by side	Miss March 1971, Cynthia Hall original ASCII – side by side
Miss August 1960 – Elaine Paul original ASCII – side by side	Miss October 1960 – Kathy Douglas original ASCII – side by side	Morganna Roberts – The Kissing Bandit original ASCII – side by side
Miss July 1972 Carol O’Neal original ASCII – side by side	Miss “Ape Girl” – Victoria Principal – 09/1973 original ASCII – side by side	Miss December 1976 – Karen Hafter original ASCII – side by side
Miss January 1974 – Nancy Cameron original ASCII – side by side	Miss June 1983 – Marianne Gravatte original ASCII – side by side	Alberto Vargas Girl “Topless Batgirl” original ASCII – side by side
Playboy 12/1972 Cover Image original ASCII – side by side	Alberto Vargas Girl from March 1968 original ASCII – side by side	Miss September 1966 – Dianne Chandler original ASCII – side by side
Alberto Vargas Girl from July 1972 original ASCII – side by side	Alberto Vargas Girl from April 1973 original ASCII – side by side	Alberto Vargas Girl from April 1972 original ASCII – side by side
Alberto Vargas Girl from March 1968 original ASCII – side by side	Miss July 1983 – Ruth Guerri original ASCII – side by side	Alberto Vargas Girl from February 1972 original ASCII – side by side

That’s it and all that I got so far. I try to find more matches, but it’s not that easy. The names and notes of the ASCII images is not always very detailed and some times even wrong. In some cases is the original also not the Playboy centerfold, but something else.

YOUR HELP IS NEEDED! There are still plenty of ASCII art pieces in my gallery that need to be matched to their reference photograph (Playboy Magazine Centerfolds, Pictorials and other Photo Sources). I wrote another blog post about this project, where I also provide some more information and several downloads that help with finding the original photos for the remaining ASCII art images. See details here. Hey, looking at beautiful nude girls is not a bad job at all

I hope that you liked my discoveries. Let me know in the comments below.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC