Project Gutenberg books had a frugal look, with their Plain Vanilla ASCII format, which might have been produced on an old typewriter;but then it was content, not form, that mattered to Mr Hart.
ASCII characters are the lowest common denominator for computers nowadays and practically every modern computer can interpret binary data into these characters.
Well, I realized, you know, there's all these fun techniques you can do for compression, like the shape of the ASCII you send down Is in a lot of these engines are actually just proportional to the lumosity of that pixel.
And if each is encoded in 8 bits, using something like ASCII, it would consume 16,000 bits of memory for an entire screen full of text, which is way more reasonable.
One crazy fact is that the most powerful supercomputer in the year 2000 was the ASCII White, which cost $110 million and could perform 12.3 trillion operations a second.