The upper/lowercase font in the Hi-Res Character Generator routine for the Apple II (Contributed Software No. 3) came from the character generator chip of a Commodore PET, which was just a 2716-format ROM. The Apple II had an empty $D000-$D7FF socket that was pin-compatible. I pulled the chip from the PET, plugged it into the Apple II, wrote it to a disk file, and voila.
@liaizon@mwichary yes (though i guess the actual legality here is murky, since i don't directly own the original fonts, only their actual recreation as TTFs ... so buyer beware etc)
@mwichary@patrick_h_lauke interesting I hadn't thought about the font IP being different but it makes sense since all the other IP stuff is wonky across borders. Pirate Pixel Fonts it is then!
The Mullard SAA5050 font also - was used for teletext on every TV sold in the UK and many in Europe for a couple of decades. Also found as the default BBC Micro "mode 7" font which used one of these chips.
@mwichary The earliest I saw was the (Navy sourced?) Bodoni vector font, which we digitized at U of Toronto for nroff on the Versatec and later resurfaced in the falsely attributed "Berkeley typesetting software". That font, or possibly someone else's digitization of it, appeared on countless graphs in science papers all through the '80s and early '90s. It was only 100dpi but was free and available.
@mwichary In terms of global ubiquity and familiarity it has to be the IBM PC's fonts. I travelled a lot to developing countries from the 80s on. PCs were proliferating, games machines etc nowhere to be seen.
I once paid for a TTF of a PC font with all characters, incl reverse video, to prepare documentation for some DOS software. Made all the difference having good facsimile screens.
@mwichary For a small, but illustrious, set of people, the XGP fonts are probably etched into their memory. The XGP printer was made at Xerox PARC and distributes to handful of academic and research institutes in the early 70s. Many computer science and artificial intelligence papers and theses were printed on the XGP. The fonts were jointly maintained between MIT, CMU, Stanford, ISI, etc.
@mwichary I feel like there's a standard low-res bitmap typeface that I've seen used in a number of places, from the TI-83 calculators to Daktronics electronic road signs. Someone recreated it here: https://www.dafont.com/ti-83-plus-large.font
Could be wrong, but I know I've seen this anonymous typeface in a range of different circumstances. Might be an industry standard of some sort; would love to know more about this, but I don't know what it's called.
@mwichary That's it! Yeah, I see that typeface on pretty much any small screen that needs to display upper- and lowercase letters. Even considering the limited number of letter designs in those circumstances, I always had a sense it was one specific typeface; very cool to finally know the source.
@mwichary whoa. Did not know this. Have you seen any of the Mullard letters in the wild? Sounds like this was used primarily in Europe, in the 80s, but that wasn't more than a minute of research on my part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullard_SAA5050
I honestly think the Mullard characters are better. The squished y and q on the Hitachi set have always looked wrong to me; not sure why they did it that way, since the Mullard design seems like the more obvious solution.
@mwichary (ah—the Mullard letters are 9px high, vs 7px on the Hitachi letters, so they have room for actual descenders. Missed that. I still think that q looks weird though.)
@psu_13@mwichary yeah, the VT-100 typeface is up there with my picks. I'd recognize it anywhere. My first computer was a DEC Rainbow, so the first text I ever saw on a computer screen was that VT-100 typography.
(My Terminal theme is orange VT-100 on a black screen; full circle, 38 years later.)
I bet there are also regional hits. Polish people of a certain age would probably instantly recognize TAG and ChiWriter fonts, and everyone else in the world would be like “huh.”
@chrisphin@mwichary Yup, I was about to say, anyone who has used a the Amstrad font enough (whether on a CPC or on a PCW) can probably recognize it very quickly.
@jbqueru@chrisphin@mwichary Probably best not to refer to it as "The Amstrad font" as the CPC, PCW, PC-1514, NC-200 etc. all had different fonts (PCW and CPC were closest but still differences).
Thank you for all the great submissions. The interesting discovery for me is how incestuous this space was. Atari vs. Commodore 8-bit fonts are weirdly related in both directions (Atari grabbed the uppercase, Commodore later the lowercase?), and so are Atari/Namco arcade fonts; SAA5050 teletext was inspired by Signetics 2513; Hitachi 5x7 HD44780 was used everywhere; and Chris Espinosa just admitted to “borrowing” parts of the Commodore PET font to bring it to Apple II. https://mastodon.online/@Cdespinosa@mastodon.social/112313573541866323
No one mentioned Lisa which is not a surprise, but it also had a rather distinctive font (look at those sharp Vs and Ws), based off of non-square pixels.
By the way, outside of the talk I’m working on (which is – to me – the obvious goal), there really needs to be a gallery of all of these with screenshots in context, connections and stories, but also an ability to type and compare…
@mwichary It's hard for me to separate my own personal most-recognized bitmaps fonts from "tech history" in general, but I'd suggestion:
— Geneva 9 (Finder, so many other places in classic MacOS)
— Monaco 9 (default programming font for the entire classic Mac era)
— Whatever the 9px font was on Palm Pilots.
One of the tech/graphic design mags released a slew of bit map fonts to readers, right as most screen resolutions and printer resolutions became fairly tight. Making in the extreme cases some very small bit map fonts. Which I used as is. 300 ppi printers and above at the edge of legibility, beyond some offset ink bleed at press.
@gruber@mwichary But did the Monaco exists as 9 pt bitmap font? On my Classic with System 7.1 it seems like it doesn't.
Geneva seems like it was the only font that did have an italic bitmap (9 pt) version. Times, Helvetica and Palatino doesn't and look crap in italics because bitmap override the TrueType-versions
@aslakr@mwichary Monaco 9 was in the ROM. It had to be so it could be used by MacsBug. IIRC, towards the end, there was a version on disk that overrode the version in ROM -- the tweaked version had glyphs that clarified certain lookalike characters.
@jamesthomson Yeah, that was the first bullet point – I think there were millions of variations, but the Atari/Namco/etc. font is pretty distinctive and was copied so widely.
@mwichary@jamesthomson Toshi Omagari, in his splendid book “Arcade Game Typography: The Art of Pixel Type”, just calls it “the Atari font”, but of course he documents a slew of ever-so-slightly-tweaked variants. Debuted with the game “Quiz Show" in 1979.
@damieng@mwichary Very nice! The MSX was very popular in Brazil, so that's very familiar to me too. I always thought it looked more similar to the PET font than the Apple II -- maybe it had an array of influences?
@mwichary The fonts that Squaresoft used during the Super NES days are up there.
I would also put in a vote for Silkscreen, as it is clearly intended to work like a bitmap font even if you could get it in a TTF package, and they were often presented in bitmap images.
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