39
votes
Accepted
What mid-1970s to mid-1980s home computers had their graphics characters added to Unicode 13?
The new additions mentioned are mostly to be found in the new Symbols for Legacy Computing block (PDF link) covering the 1FB00–1FBFF codepoint range. This block includes:
a large number of BLOCK ...
- 2,591
36
votes
Are there vintage or historical bitmapped fonts available for non-commercial use?
Try THE OLDSCHOOL PC FONT RESOURCE
Looks positively awesome to me. I started by looking for IBM MDA - the classic 9x14 font, and I found this site.
License is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike ...
30
votes
Accepted
Why did the original Apple //e have two sets of inverse video characters?
Why did the original Apple //e have two sets of inverse uppercase characters?
Simple: To allow lower case inverse letters.
It's all about the clever way Woz arranged the original II's single ...
- 173k
29
votes
Are there vintage or historical bitmapped fonts available for non-commercial use?
-misc-fixed-* X11 font "family" matches all your criteria - it originated sometime in the 1980s, thus it can be considered retro or vintage, is distributed public domain, comes in several sizes (5x7 ...
- 4,695
28
votes
Accepted
Proportional fonts on 8-bit computers
Digital Research produced as one of their early attempts into graphical desktops (on their way to GEM) a basic portable graphics library - GSX. GSX did actually support proportional fonts, both in ...
- 28.4k
19
votes
Are there vintage or historical bitmapped fonts available for non-commercial use?
Are there vintage or historical bitmapped fonts available for non-commercial use?
I'm looking for a source for one or a few 1-bit black-or-white
bitmapped fonts used in the past, available in a ...
- 10.9k
17
votes
Proportional fonts on 8-bit computers
Just the first (of many) example of using proportional fonts on Commodore64: https://youtu.be/k2NRlsopoOU?t=441
You couldn't really use a proportional font on the Spectrum because
the colour ...
- 9,326
15
votes
Are there vintage or historical bitmapped fonts available for non-commercial use?
Damien Guard's series of articles starting with Typography in 8 bits: System fonts has versions of almost all of the old system fonts you might remember.
If you don't mind digging about in ROM images,...
- 17.2k
14
votes
Proportional fonts on 8-bit computers
Back in 1986, a company called Berkeley Softworks released a GUI desktop environment called GEOS for the Commodore 64. It was later ported to the Commodore 128, the Commodore Plus/4, and Apple II.
...
- 1,743
12
votes
Accepted
How did the Microprofessor II have space for a Chinese font in the ROM?
Check out this page https://classictech.wordpress.com/computer-companies/acer-groupmultitech-electronics-inc-sunnyvale-calif/
Esp. the PDF at the end of the article, dated September 14th 1982: https:/...
- 236
11
votes
Proportional fonts on 8-bit computers
The games Skool Daze and Back To Skool used proportional fonts for text on the ZX Spectrum.
(source: worldofspectrum.org)
11
votes
Proportional fonts on 8-bit computers
No 8-bit computer (back then) supported proportional fonts out of the box, but there where some programs on almost every bitmap-capable 8 bit computer. I this would include the Spectrum.
For the Apple ...
- 173k
9
votes
Accepted
What happened to IntelliFont (i.e. Amiga vector fonts)?
The need for IntelliFont (FAIS) format fonts kind of fizzled out, and Agfa concentrated on its industrial printing side from the late 1990s. Initially, Adobe wouldn't give a licence or open up their ...
- 17.2k
8
votes
How to convert .ttf to .fnt for use with M10_SCR.COM DOS font driver
This is Morozov’s screen driver, available e.g. from SimtelNet archives. It uses a fairly typical font format for EGA/VGA fonts, namely a dump of the in-memory font data as loaded for the character ...
- 96.6k
8
votes
Why did the original Apple //e have two sets of inverse video characters?
The screen character set on the Apple II looks like this:
00-1f: ASCII 40-5f, but inverse text
20-3f: ASCII 20-3f, but inverse text
40-5f: ASCII 40-5f, but flashing text
60-7f: ASCII 20-3f, but ...
- 7,591
6
votes
Are there vintage or historical bitmapped fonts available for non-commercial use?
The Amstrad CPC bitmap font is detailed in chapter 7 of the user manual. There is an 8x8 bitmap for each ASCII character.
- 3,297
6
votes
Are there vintage or historical bitmapped fonts available for non-commercial use?
The bitmap fonts that come with http://x3270.bgp.nu/documentation-faq.html are licensed under the same MIT-like terms the program is under. Some of them are too large for your application, but there ...
- 375
6
votes
SAPCOL Japanese digital typesetting machines
A bit of googling finds this Japanese article, and DeepL does a really impressive English translation, which I am mostly just going to quote, with a bit of corrections.
Timeline overview:
1960: ...
- 21.9k
6
votes
How to convert .ttf to .fnt for use with M10_SCR.COM DOS font driver
I suspect that what you're dealing with here is two different file formats that happen to use the same filename extension, of ".fnt". There has never been any mechanism to control the use of filename ...
- 7,814
5
votes
Accepted
Where did the standard arcade font originate?
It's a bold 8x8 pixel sans font.
Hard- and software wise using an 8x8 font is the most simple way to go and to create emphasis making it bold needs the least effort. Within an 8x8 grid, there aren't ...
- 173k
4
votes
Accepted
What did the Datapoint 3300 character font look like?
This answer may not contain a good enough image( although the last link may also be useful since it seems to use identical font ), here is part of an image on the following catalog -
That catalog can ...
- 450
4
votes
How did the Microprofessor II have space for a Chinese font in the ROM?
The Wikipedia page on 'Chinese BASIC' (which cites the Multitech Microprofessor as the article's most prominent example) depicts a traditional Chinese keyboard of the time, showing only 113 Chinese ...
- 32.5k
3
votes
Proportional fonts on 8-bit computers
Other replies already give examples which use proportional text, so I won't add to them.
However, I want to challenge the claim that "[s]ure, it would be a bit slower to render text, but for many ...
- 9,380
3
votes
Proportional fonts on 8-bit computers
Even if one is using a bitmap mode, a routine to draw tile-based graphics that are aligned with byte boundaries can be much faster than one which isn't thus restricted. Suppose one wants to draw an 8-...
- 28.1k
3
votes
Are there vintage or historical bitmapped fonts available for non-commercial use?
Brandon Rhodes has extracted and converted the AT&T 3B1 (also known as the AT&T Unix PC) screen font (and given instructions on how to extract others) from the original install files.
You can ...
- 375
3
votes
SAPCOL Japanese digital typesetting machines
Background
In photo typesetting four basic generations can be distinguished
Generation (1950s): Modified Linotype style machines. Here the metal matrices were modified to carry a character negative ...
- 173k
1
vote
What mid-1970s to mid-1980s home computers had their graphics characters added to Unicode 13?
Since the BBC Micro had a Teletext chip (SAA5050) and used it for its MODE 7 and the Teletext character set was added (I believe in that revision), it had its character set added, although, maybe just ...
1
vote
Proportional fonts on 8-bit computers
Sure, it would be a bit slower to render text, but for many purposes,
surely worth it. Yet all the 8-bit programs I can find, still used a
fixed width font.
For some purposes it would be worth it, ...
- 5,813
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