Text
It’s rare that you will find a graphical user interface without text. In the past, display devices operated in two modes, a text mode, and a graphics mode. If you ever used the original versions of DOS or Unix, you were operating in text mode. This meant there was no way to draw graphics on the screen (other than the characters of the text themselves), so text couldn’t be written on buttons or appear upside-down or sideways and the design of the characters themselves was limited. The fanciest images available on a screen were drawn with text, such as this fish:
|\ \\\\__ o
| \_/ o \ o
> _ (( <_ oo
| / \__+___/
|/ |/
The images, called ASCII art (see www.asciiart.eu for more examples), originated in the 1970s and 1980s on computer bulletin board systems, but their popularity waned as computer displays and graphics cards became more advanced and graphical interfaces were introduced. However, people still use ASCII art...
