"Text Mode Lives!"
February 5, 2016 3:56 PM   Subscribe

 
##### THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER FOR AN ENTITY SUCH AS I. #####
posted by PROD_TPSL at 4:06 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Uh. Now I want a Metafilter theme, terminal style.
posted by lmfsilva at 4:11 PM on February 5, 2016 [6 favorites]


Just for the record, these fonts look great in Konsole via links.
posted by PROD_TPSL at 4:19 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Miscellaneous clones - BIOS/OEM fonts

These all replace the 8x8 PC BIOS font in their respective machines, so they only ever show up in graphics mode, and include just the lower 128 ASCII characters. The other 128 were added manually to complete the CP437 character set, with varying amounts of effort to keep the design consistent (and most of these didn't merit much effort).


Heh.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:25 PM on February 5, 2016


Aw, that jumble of colors and bold/unbold font on the homepage gave me tremendous MUD flashbacks. Now I'm wishing (not for the first time) MUDs were still a thing.
posted by DingoMutt at 4:35 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Egress.
posted by humboldt32 at 4:36 PM on February 5, 2016


MUDs are still a thing.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:38 PM on February 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


MetaFilter on the console would be cool. Ideally, it comes complete with perplexing emacs commands for switching between a professional white background and a more casual blue theme.
posted by mccarty.tim at 4:44 PM on February 5, 2016 [5 favorites]


I'm guessing that most of these weren't designed by professional designers but by engineers tasked with creating some character bitmaps for their new graphic adapter, hence the variable quality. (Apple, and later Microsoft, had Susan Kare doing their bitmaps, but the ATIs and Amstrads of this world might not have thought that the issue merited the expense of hiring a specialist.)
posted by acb at 4:45 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


See here for getting the original Mac fonts (note the different steps for El Capitan at the bottom.)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:52 PM on February 5, 2016


M-x C-+ binds to "administrator, please hope me"
posted by mccarty.tim at 5:01 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


My first thought was "hey, it's the Strong Bad email font!" which probably puts me in a very specific age range.
posted by Metroid Baby at 5:14 PM on February 5, 2016 [6 favorites]


I love the idea of this but just looking at that page hurts me neurologically and gives me flashbacks
posted by GospelofWesleyWillis at 5:39 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I endured the nostalgia of my beloved AT&T 6300 font for about ten minutes before realizing holy shit, this is unreadable. I had much better eyesight as a child. (Although I'm guessing these also look a lot better in amber on a low res CRT.)
posted by phooky at 5:42 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


I love the idea of this but just looking at that page hurts me neurologically and gives me flashbacks

Whereas this is so utterly my jam that it sent me into a dazed fugue of pure happiness.
posted by selfnoise at 5:47 PM on February 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


I'm guessing that most of these weren't designed by professional designers but by engineers tasked with creating some character bitmaps for their new graphic adapter
I went straight to the 3270-PC (because I spent years on 3270 before the PC came out) which probably bears this out, having to make it look like a 327x.
posted by MtDewd at 5:55 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Now that I got my Apple TV and bluetooth keyboard talking, I've been half-tempted to write a CLI environment app, turning the TV into a Atari 800-ish experience.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 5:59 PM on February 5, 2016 [4 favorites]


I remember my sheer delight in finding out Westminster was a legit typeface.

If you played Oregon Trail in elementary school, there's a nonzero chance you computer lab featured at least one poster that employed Westminster. It made everything look more ... computery.
posted by panama joe at 6:03 PM on February 5, 2016 [7 favorites]


  but the ATIs and Amstrads of this world might not have thought that the issue merited the expense of hiring a specialist.)

I dunno, the Amstrad one is quite pretty and very legible. It does look like one of the standard character-gen fonts of the age (but maybe not the iconic SAA5050 Teletext fonts).

panama joe: If you thought that Westminster was bad, McLuhan's grave plaque is set in the similarly awful Data 70.
posted by scruss at 6:44 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


Now that I got my Apple TV and bluetooth keyboard talking, I've been half-tempted to write a CLI environment app, turning the TV into a Atari 800-ish experience.

This should help.

It seems pretty close to the original. I actually used an Atari 800XL and Bank Street Writer as my primary word processor from 1983 to the first semester of college in 1994. It still works to this day, though I haven't tried to use my old parallel printer port adapter since '94.

Every single time I see it, the Westminster typeface has always made me think of two films - Westworld and Rollerball. I miss that font, and it's only a few minutes after waxing nostalgic and wishing it was around more, that I realize I see it every time I write or cash a check in the routing and account number. Still, it should get more use than just that. It's the font of the future, dammit.
posted by chambers at 6:55 PM on February 5, 2016 [3 favorites]


If you played Oregon Trail in elementary school, there's a nonzero chance you computer lab featured at least one poster that employed Westminster. It made everything look more ... computery.

Westminster and its rectilinear-blobby pseudo-OCR kin are to computers what steam locomotives with ornate funnels and cowcatchers are to railways.
posted by acb at 7:00 PM on February 5, 2016 [6 favorites]


Westminster and its rectilinear-blobby pseudo-OCR kin are to computers what steam locomotives with ornate funnels and cowcatchers are to railways.

Yes, they are indeed. A balance of beauty, function, complex science contained in a form that appears simple and basic, and chock-full of built-in reliability that makes it withstand a great deal of possible adverse conditions and still function as intended.

Of course, some do call it ugly and dated, and maybe they're not entirely wrong, but who's going to trust something like Arial or Helvetica on a bank check to remain readable by both humans and computers after a combination of being folded, wrinkled, dropped in a dirty puddle, and then flattened and dried out with an iron or under a hot lamp?

Yes, Westminster might not be "pretty" or win an award for being "aesthetically pleasing," but it's proven it's worth in reliability for half a century, and does not deserve the disdain it often gets.
posted by chambers at 7:23 PM on February 5, 2016 [2 favorites]




The blobby style of Data70 and Winchester aren't for OCR, it's for MICR, magnetic ink character recognition. On cheques the account and routing information were printed with a special ink that contained iron oxide and the blobs were large enough that a read head could detect them as the documents passed under the scanner.
posted by autopilot at 8:50 PM on February 5, 2016 [2 favorites]


Forget the fonts, check out the ANSI. Memories of ACiD and iCE!
posted by Yowser at 9:24 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


IBM VGA8 is pretty good.
posted by Zed at 9:33 PM on February 5, 2016


plops one of these fonts into his terminal and loads up rainbowstream...
posted by destructive cactus at 1:25 AM on February 6, 2016


The 70 in "Data 70" refers to the percentage of early eighties computer science textbooks which employed it on the cover.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:40 AM on February 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


C:\>
posted by blue_beetle at 4:43 AM on February 6, 2016


> The blobby style of Data70 and Winchester aren't for OCR, it's for MICR, magnetic ink character recognition.

Except that only MICR is to be used for that purpose, and its entire character set are ten digits and some control characters. Data70 and Westmister are graphic designers' riffs on the visual style to provide an alphabet and more punctuation, and were not meant for technical applications.

OCR-A and OCR-B are full alphanumeric character sets (for the purpose of a limited range of European languages, anyway) intended for both technical and human use. OCR-B was designed by Adrian Frutiger, and looks the most like a generic contemporary vectorized monospace font and the least like something that would appear on a movie poster about computers taking over the world.
posted by ardgedee at 6:08 AM on February 6, 2016 [4 favorites]


OCR-B is also mandated on all passports, and - fun fact! - ISO/ANSI/ECMA threw out the master drawings some years ago. So we're stuck with a standard used on all passports with no available reference. Smooth.

All these little standard fonts that have important niches in our life, like Farrington 7B, E-13B and CMC-7; where would we be without them?
posted by scruss at 6:55 AM on February 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


Just looking at this page makes me feel good inside.
posted by curious nu at 8:29 AM on February 6, 2016


I know some of the people who produced some of the early-80s UK home computer character sets (my own efforts in that department were for prototypes that never made it into production, and no record of them exists. Which is a shame; there's one font specifically designed for a very odd aspect ratio display that I was quite proud of...).

Yes, they were coders and/or hardware engineers with no formal graphical or typographical training. There was a lot of graph paper and binary data types in assembler source. However, being very bright auto-didacts, they took this part of the job very seriously - and it was, to be honest, a great deal of fun. So many books were read, experiments done and discussions had with whatever professional typographers could be roped in. The hardware and software limitations helped set useful bounds on what could be achieved or aimed at, as did the way text was actually used by application software.

A lot of effort was put in by people who weren't scared to try new ideas, and I think that shows in how well things worked out given the constraints. You could characterise a lot of early home computing engineering like that...

(The arrival of the first Macintosh - I was working at the time in a place that arranged one to be shipped over from the US with indecent haste after the launch - was a real shocker, and raised the bar overnight.)
posted by Devonian at 11:55 AM on February 6, 2016 [9 favorites]


> All these little standard fonts that have important niches in our life, like Farrington 7B, E-13B and CMC-7; where would we be without them?

In all seriousness, Comic Sans is probably a passable OCR font.
posted by ardgedee at 12:50 PM on February 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


9x15.pcf or GTFO
posted by Sauce Trough at 12:53 PM on February 6, 2016


Best / highest use of old-timey computer font: RACISM DOES NOT COMPUTE
posted by Sauce Trough at 1:09 PM on February 6, 2016 [2 favorites]


In all seriousness, Comic Sans is probably a passable OCR font.

great, now my chest hurts
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:45 PM on February 6, 2016 [1 favorite]


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