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   Marcin Wichary (mwichary@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 22-Apr-2024 09:42:57 JST Marcin Wichary

   What would you consider as the most recognizable bitmap fonts in tech history?

   I’m imagining stuff like:
   - the arcade/Atari font
   - Chicago (Mac, then iPod)
   - VCR/video equipment fonts
   - Minecraft font
   - IBM PC fonts (MDA, VGA, stuff like that)
   - perhaps System font from Windows 3.x
   - Commodore 64, just because of the sheer popularity of the machine

   What am I missing?

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     Chris Espinosa (cdespinosa@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 22-Apr-2024 22:40:11 JST Chris Espinosa

     in reply to

     @mwichary

     A long overdue confession:

     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.

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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Tuesday, 23-Apr-2024 02:53:18 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to
     @mwichary Pretty sure the font shipped on sparc and Solaris would be recognizable as it's one of the rare serif console fonts.
     RDI_UltraSPARC_Notebook_(3497486333).jpg
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     Rob Pike (robpike@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 23-Apr-2024 02:54:38 JST Rob Pike

     in reply to

     @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.

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     Lars Brinkhoff (larsbrinkhoff@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Tuesday, 23-Apr-2024 02:55:25 JST Lars Brinkhoff

     in reply to

     @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.

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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Tuesday, 23-Apr-2024 03:45:32 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     @mwichary Took the 12×22 version included in linux source code and rendered them into a sheet:
     sheet.png
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     nachtrabe did nothing wrong (nachtrabe@bae.st)'s status on Tuesday, 23-Apr-2024 04:16:03 JST nachtrabe did nothing wrong

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     @lanodan @mwichary
     Sexy
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