Lost Ancestors of ASCII Art(theatlantic.com)
theatlantic.com
Lost Ancestors of ASCII Art
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/the-lost-ancestors-of-ascii-art/283445/
1 comments
Look down at the picture of the Siamese cat. There is and example of Run Length Encoding. I expect that some of the other source materials will also show Run Length Encoding early enough that it would have invalidated a number of patents as prior art. But unfortunately, at the time these patents were being enforced, we didn't have such a rich Internet to use to find this info. Hopefully people will keep up the task of digitizing the past so that these ideas are not lost. The people of the past were more like us than we imagine.