I was actually active as a gfx/ASCII-artist/swapper on the Amiga back in the early nineties (when I was young, lol)... I was a member of a hacker/cracker/demo-group called [L]egend, a break-off group of the infamous Razor 1911... We had divisions around the world, and a few BBS's too... All elite, of course... ASCII-art was popular too, making collections and spreading them.. maybe mostly in the hacker-groups....
Was fun, and pre-internet! We swapped demos and games and stuff by mail on 3.5 diskettes, if you can believe it... And called up BBS's by modem... And we had to hack telephone lines and stuff because the telephone-bills got huge, and parents went insane... Hehe...
Crazy stuff like using Blue-Box (a program which played a series of beeps into the telephone, tricking the analogue phone system into giving you free calls, haha!