Tag Archives: Typography

airconditioncomputingnightmare:

CGA and MDA, Part 2
As I briefly touched upon in my previous writeup on CGA vs. MDA, CGA’s 80×25 text mode is significantly coarser than MDA’s. CGA’s 80 column text mode is rendered at 640×200 with 8×8 characters (stretched vertically to approximately 640×400), while MDA’s 80 column text mode is rendered at 720×350 with larger 9×14 characters. MDA was capable of giving text attributes such as being bolded, italicized or underlined.

Seen here are the two side-to-side on the same display, a Compaq Portable’s screen.

The first image shows a ROM-dump of the font in the legendary terminals VT100 and VT220. The second image is a representation of how they appear on screen. The difference is more than just aspect ratio. Look at letters like q and p: pixels are sometimes doubled, sometimes tripled. The fascinating explanation is here.

Text labyrinth in buginese from 1794, via. Buginese is spoken by millions of people in Indonesia. ᨄᨘᨑᨊᨗᨀᨚᨆᨙᨋᨉᨙᨄ

Works by MuirMcNeil, a British design agency.

By Julien Priez (Tumblr) for All Eyes on Type, a calligraphy and typography festival in May.

Very textmodey profile by Ivo Brower for All Eyes On Type, a calligraphy and typography festival in Rotterdam in May.

yesterdaysprint:

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri, January 21, 1910

 

Typewritten fonts by Murielle Rouleau (top, using only m) and Julius Nelson (bottom, using X and _). From Today’s Secretary 1950-1951. Scanned by Marcin Wichary.

From 1882, these graphics were made with 13 symbols (shown at the bottom). This is a modular type called Combination Border No. 16, by Bruce’s New York Type Foundry. A little bit like PETSCII, a little bit more like alpha blox.

Found by Pinwheel Press & thanks to Marcin Wichary for the tip.

LetraTime, a German magazine from 1975. This cover won ITC’s first Upper and Lower Case International Typographics Competition.

More info. h/t: Tim Koch