I was recently exploring fonts of the next decade from old Mac system 6-9 era on my still in progress personal blog site https://hankdoes.ai/design-system/
Thank you author for the font and the lovely dive into computing and type history!
rob74 12 hours ago [-]
In Germany (maybe also Austria?), that font is probably best known from the logo of major computer magazine/site CHIP (https://www.chip.de/). Although, for some unfathomable reason, the C in the "dead test font" doesn't have the characteristic "thickening" in the lower vertical part, although the G has it...
ikari_pl 1 hours ago [-]
This is basically the MICR font: Magnetic Ink (!) Character Recognition. Amazing idea.
And so many variant typefaces of the same graphical language were seen in a million products during the home computer boom of the late 70s and early 80s. Iconic.
kevin_thibedeau 3 hours ago [-]
It's a copy of the Westminster font from the 60s which was an adaption of the visual style of MICR digits and symbols to a full symbology (without being machine readable). It was a meme for computerbilia of the era that now seems quaint.
scotty79 5 hours ago [-]
The other thing that caught my eye is that M has the thickening on the opposite side to N. I thought it was for easier recognition of similar letters (same with A and R, O and Q), but U and V have the thickening on the same side. Maybe C vs G is the reason why C doesn't have the thickening.
krige 11 hours ago [-]
Good ol' It's A Computer (tm) font. A good while back I've been using Westminster in every piece of UI I wrote for myself. Maybe I should start doing that again.
jansan 6 hours ago [-]
Here is an interesting first hand account about the history of Westminster. Interestingly the creator himself does not seem to know why the (IMO rather unfitting) name Westminster was chosen:
I love the "MICR line"-like appearance, fonts of which type were heavily used in the 1970s and 1980s to indicate "computer/technology stuff".
Chaosvex 11 hours ago [-]
Seeing typos like 'resulation' is now a nice hint that a human wrote the article.
Nice exploration, bit of quirky fun.
phrotoma 8 hours ago [-]
> Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of wherever.
masswerk 7 hours ago [-]
Every hand-knotted carpet has some error per design, since only Allah is perfect.
But, I guess, "resulation" may be a bit blotchy for a sign of humbleness. :-)
masswerk 7 hours ago [-]
Sorry, I had to fix this.
(You're welcome anyway. And yes, I think, it's the sort of quirky article, an LLM can't come up with.)
ikari_pl 4 hours ago [-]
As a perfectionist, I twitched ;-)
benj111 4 hours ago [-]
Don't say that, or else Ai will start inserting typos.
Chaosvex 4 hours ago [-]
Oh, I'm sure there are people that already do it intentionally.
jansan 6 hours ago [-]
I am pretty sure that I saw that font on a C64 before. Paradroid used a very similar font for the logo, but the game itself uses a different font (Paradrew).
daneel_w 5 hours ago [-]
There are a hundred variants of it used in various software for the C64, the Amiga, the anything.
Rendered at 18:22:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Thank you author for the font and the lovely dive into computing and type history!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...
https://www.mercerdesign.com/true-story-westminster-font/
Nice exploration, bit of quirky fun.
But, I guess, "resulation" may be a bit blotchy for a sign of humbleness. :-)
(You're welcome anyway. And yes, I think, it's the sort of quirky article, an LLM can't come up with.)