Michael J. Coslo wrote:

I understand that during the heyday of machine RTTY, they used to send
pictures that we computer people called "ascii art"

Oh yeah. I hadn't thought about that in years. There used to be some
pretty fancy ones floating around. Naturally you needed a very good
signal to send them via actual radio, since a minor loss of signal would
mess up the artwork pretty well.

A short, true, but not ham-radio story: Years ago, when the TTYs had
paper tape punches attached, one of our engineers decided to punch a
numeric-control tape using a file that he had stored in his computer
account. He punched it, put it on the numerically-controlled drill
press, and proceeded to ruin a nice hunk of metal. He came in and asked
us what the problem could possibly be. We ran the tape through the
printer and got the expected garbage typed out, until suddenly up popped:

THE SYSTEM WILL GO DOWN FOR MAINTENANCE IN FIVE MINUTES. PLEASE LOG OFF

73, Steve KB9X