Back in the day when there was no internet, BBSes were king.
BBSes were all text based, generally viewed in full-screen text mode, at 25 lines of
80 characters each. Yet they were able to use more or less elaborate text based
graphics called "ansi".
There were a lot of people who were really good at drawing those. I wansn't one of them, so
if you want to see some really good stuff, head over to iCE.
But I did draw some ansi back in the day, and here are some samples. (Plese, oh please disregard
the "cool talk" of the day) Most of these were drawn between 1994 and 1995.