References to this, or drawing from the same souce as it? The comment about "jgs" would suggest the latter.

Kinda shitty they seem to have cut out her signature.

jgs- relatively a heavyweight in the world of ascii art.

https://www.asciiart.eu/animals/dolphins

I usually put a random ascii art animal in the `motd` of random servers that I work with, and have seen tons of pieces with a “jgs” sig.

Yes, in fact their first frame looks identical to the second to last one there as for the specific placement of characters and the characters themselves.

…or a Microsoft engineer used that existing cat art. I can’t imagine they’d be afforded much time to spend designing ASCII art for a debug screen.

> I can’t imagine they’d be afforded much time to spend designing ASCII art for a debug screen.

It's something to doodle while waiting for the compiler I reckon. I can't imagine OS development to be a fast iterative process.

I can’t imagine ASCII art to be the quickest thing to doodle.

But that aside, someone else has now linked to the source and it wasn’t MS.

ASCII editors are a thing :)

eg: https://asciiflow.com/

At risk of stating the obvious, drawing a flowchart, which is ostensibly just drawing boxes, is a whole different level of difficulty to drawing pictures.

I will grant you that there are tools that will generate ASCII art using letter shading (based on the number of pixels that letter lights up) but that also is very different to using the characters themselves to draw the shape of the image (like with emoticons). That still relies on raw human creativity…well maybe AI could now do it but that wasn’t around 15 years ago when Win 8 was in development, let alone back when those images were created.

That particular site has quite interactive 'painting/drawing' features (select the 'freeform' option, press a key to 'paint' with that letter using the mouse), which is the type of thing I remember from similar ascii art programs 'back in the day' :).

No matter how useful the tool, it's still the artist that makes the art of course. But the tools can make a real difference in how creative someone can be - I doubt much of the really creative ascii art is/was made with notepad.

My point was simply that there are tools out there that really can approach that experience of 'doodling' with ascii, and I thought some people might not have been exposed to that before.