ASCII art (in slightly different form) was around before the 1990s.
Starting in the mid-70s there were photo booths in malls where you could get a photo taken and it would be converted into a very crude image dithered in digits, then printed onto a T-shirt. (1)
When I was learning typing on a manual typewriter in the very early 80s, there were books with rows of instructions like 'type 30 X's, then 10 spaces, then 20 Xs' which would result in primitive ASCII-like art of cats, owls and the like. I don't know how old they were.
Starting in the mid-70s there were photo booths in malls where you could get a photo taken and it would be converted into a very crude image dithered in digits, then printed onto a T-shirt. (1)
When I was learning typing on a manual typewriter in the very early 80s, there were books with rows of instructions like 'type 30 X's, then 10 spaces, then 20 Xs' which would result in primitive ASCII-like art of cats, owls and the like. I don't know how old they were.
(1) https://petapixel.com/2012/07/20/atari-compugraph-foto-an-as...