(At least, I think every character involved is ASCII.)

One little jolly trick that some DOS and other command-line programmers
like to use to show that something (presumably useful and desirable :) )
is happening, and maybe even how fast, is to put up a "spinner". (No need
to read further if you know of it.) On the screen* the program shows the
characters |, /, -, and \ in sequence, then repeats the sequence as
needed, doing a "destructive backspace" (the usual kind) just before
putting up the next character in the sequence. That bksp. keeps the
"spinner" in one place. Typically, as the program repeatedly passes a
certain place internally, it advance the spinner to the next character, so
the speed of the spinner shows how fast things are happening.
*text-mode only, like DOS

I dare say that some people are rather fond of the little fellow. I have
even seen spinners decorating the right end of a line of dots. As matters
progress, another dot appears, and the spinner moves to the right by one
place. In this case, the spinner apparently free-runs, and it's the
extension of the line of dots (periods) that shows progress.

As I'm about to close out this message, I remember an astonishingly
sophisticated Linux program that displays graphics, and animated at that,
using character-cell text (like that of DOS). It apparently has a lookup
table that converts a value of gray to a character that is likely to have
that (typographic) "color" -- apparent shade of gray. Because the
conversion can run really fast in modern machines, tte end results, while
"noisy", are plainly visible, and recognizable by people familiar with
graphics. As with static ASCII images, this scheme utterly ignores the
conventional meanings of the glyphs. Considering the coarseness of a
typical character-cell grid, the number of pixels (one per cell) is quite
small, hence the speed.

Uh-oh. Yet another. An experimental system at the MIT Media Lab. displayed
French (iirc) text, and had a gaze-tracker which, by bouncing infrared
light (harmless) off the viewer's eyes, could determine where the viewer
was looking. Only at the "gaze point", the software substituted the
corresponding English word, restoring the French as the viewer's gaze
shifted. (I realize that, probably, one can't exactly do a simple 1-to-1
mapping from all French to English.

Regards to all,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass. (Not "MA")
spun out -- it's past bed time