Vernacular, ASCII Portrait, 1975
printed matter
34.3 × 35.6 cm
Collection of Bre Pettis
PION.2025.005
Description
USA, 1970s. 13 1/2" x 14", printed matter.
Vernacular ASCII portrait of the kind produced by mall and shopping-mall computer-portrait booths in the 1970s — a photograph of the sitter converted on the spot to a half-tone image rendered entirely in ASCII characters, then printed on a continuous-feed tractor printer. The standard character encoding (American Standard Code for Information Interchange, finalized in 1963) made these grayscale portraits possible on otherwise text-only output devices, and the genre is a key piece of the prehistory of consumer digital imaging.
Research on the Computer Place/Atlanta Underground:
The “computer portrait” attraction in Underground Atlanta — remembered by people as The Computer Place — seems to have existed in the mid-1970s, definitely around 1975–1977.
The evidence I found:
A 1975 Atlanta History Center / Digital Library of Georgia record shows Underground Atlanta active as a shopping and entertainment district that year. It had opened in 1969 and closed in 1980 before reopening in 1989.
A February 1977 issue of Kilobaud specifically mentions Underground Atlanta having computer portraits and computer-operated games, and elsewhere says computer portrait setups were making money in “the Atlanta Underground.”
Public recollections online identify the place as “The Computer Place” and recall computer portraits there in 1975, but I’d treat that name as oral-history/recollection unless you find a receipt, directory listing, or photo caption.
The original Underground Atlanta era ended in 1980 because of MARTA construction and other factors, then reopened in 1989.
So the safest answer is: The Computer Place / computer portrait booth was active in Underground Atlanta by 1975 and still referenced in 1977; it likely belonged to the original 1969–1980 Underground Atlanta era.