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53 votes

What was the original unix font?

Sorry to disapoint you, there is no 'unix' font. Unix was developed on mini computers using terminals, which could be CRT based or printing terminals (teletype). In either case the 'font' used was ...
Raffzahn's user avatar
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50 votes

How was the @ sign added to keyboards and character sets?

The @ symbol was present on typewriters a long time before computers were invented, see for example this 1889 Hammond typewriter. In English-writing countries, the symbol was already used in ...
Stephen Kitt's user avatar
48 votes
Accepted

Which font with slashed zero is being used in this screengrab?

The font in use appears to be the ‘9×14’ bitmap font (i.e. 8×14 glyph bitmaps tweaked for 9×14 character cells) of the Hercules graphics card. The title of the video is ‘Windows1 (1985) PC XT ...
user3840170's user avatar
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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 ...
natevw's user avatar
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37 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 ...
manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact's user avatar
30 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 ...
Radovan Garabík's user avatar
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 ...
Raffzahn's user avatar
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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 ...
tofro's user avatar
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21 votes

How do 80x25 characters (each with dimension 9x16 pixels) fit on a VGA display of resolution 640x480?

CRTs don’t have a fixed pixel resolution; early CRTs have fixed timings (25.175 MHz and 28.322 MHz for VGA). VGA 80×25 text mode really does produce 400 lines of 720 pixels, as you determined, with a ...
Stephen Kitt's user avatar
21 votes
Accepted

How do 80x25 characters (each with dimension 9x16 pixels) fit on a VGA display of resolution 640x480?

How does VGA manage to show 720x400 resolution text on a 640x480 display? This might be your basic misunderstanding here. Displays as used back then and what VGA was designed for, are not a fixed ...
Raffzahn's user avatar
  • 213k
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 ...
Will Hartung's user avatar
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19 votes

What was the original unix font?

My first (1983) exposure to Unix was via teletypes and CRT terminals (VT52, ADM3a) so the fonts were generated by the terminal devices and nothing to do with the OS itself. Troff was used but only ...
Frog's user avatar
  • 1,315
18 votes

What was the original unix font?

Obviously something like this ASR-33 lookalike font as seen here (image is from the Wikipedia article "History of Unix". Title: Ken Thompson (sitting) and Dennis Ritchie at PDP-11 ...
davidbak's user avatar
  • 6,119
18 votes

How was the @ sign added to keyboards and character sets?

The AT-symbol is a US development in use at least since the early 1800s, denoting single unit prices in commercial texts (*1). It was as much used, that early typewriters of the 1880s added it as ...
Raffzahn's user avatar
  • 213k
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 ...
lvd's user avatar
  • 10.2k
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,...
scruss's user avatar
  • 20.6k
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. ...
Jukka Aho's user avatar
  • 2,012
14 votes

What dot matrix printer? - UK, 1987

The printer looks quite like a C.T.I. CP-80 variant. The silver oval is a give away. See this picture of a CP-80 Model II I have pulled out a few weeks ago for a PC-XT setup to help with GlaBIOS. (...
Raffzahn's user avatar
  • 213k
14 votes

Which font with slashed zero is being used in this screengrab?

According to the video's description the used graphics card is a Hercules Graphics Card. This type is as well what gets selected during installation at 2:36. Since the very same font is clearly ...
Raffzahn's user avatar
  • 213k
14 votes
Accepted

What's the correct Unicode code point for the Apple IIe's "delete" symbol?

TL;DR: There is no 'REVERSE FIVE-BY-FIVE CENTERED CHECKER BOARD' (*1) in all of Unicode's blocks. Closest by looks and positioning might be the "REVERSE FOUR-BY-FOUR CHECKER BOARD" U+1FBA6 ...
Raffzahn's user avatar
  • 213k
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:/...
T Nierath's user avatar
  • 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 ...
Raffzahn's user avatar
  • 213k
10 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 ...
Stephen Kitt's user avatar
10 votes
Accepted

Does the old bitmapped version of the Tahoma font exist anywhere?

I don't think Tahoma ever was distributed as a bitmap font. The idea that it was likely came from this interview with Matthew Carter, Georgia & Verdana - typefaces for the screen - www.will-harris....
scruss's user avatar
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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 ...
scruss's user avatar
  • 20.6k
9 votes

What dot matrix printer? - UK, 1987

A useful place to start with the matrix dimensions is this diagram from the Epson LX-810 LX-850 Service Manual: Each pin is 0.29 mm diameter, and pins are spaced 0.35 mm apart vertically. ...
scruss's user avatar
  • 20.6k
9 votes

Which font with slashed zero is being used in this screengrab?

We can see that the zeros are slashed, so it is probably not one of the 9x16 fonts which used to have dotted zeros. Actually, that is the key clue. Dotted vs. slashed zeros were never specific to ...
manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact's user avatar
9 votes

What's the correct Unicode code point for the Apple IIe's "delete" symbol?

Only because @trikly asked (in this comment), from the relevant Unicode documentation(PDF), the three new "Specific symbols for delete" that have been accepted for future inclusion in the ...
FeRD's user avatar
  • 331
8 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 ...
Raffzahn's user avatar
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