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.
Southwest Technical’s 6800 computer and the CT-64 terminal, and a photo of its 64×16 textmode. Launched in 1975. First image from Creative Computing and second one from here.
The 1986 retina screen: the WY-700 video card/screen gave the PC a 1280×800 resolution, and a text-mode of 160 columns by 50 lines. It had a built-in 16×16 font (download), and you could even use your own custom fonts. The high-res modes only supported greyscale, but who needs colours anyway?
Sources: John Elliot, thecomputerarchive.com, PC Mag.
The European font of the Sega SC-3000. Notice how curvy the full triangles and slashes are. Images from SMS Power and Saverio Russo.
By Ray Manta, @datad00r, using his own Circlex charset, now available in Retrospecs.
The three TRS-80 models had no less than 22 different fonts in total (top image), available in Rebecca Bettencourt’s font pack Another Mans Treasure. Shown here are the international fonts from TRS-80 Model 4, and Rebecca’s additions in the last image.
Jindai moji, supposedly used in Japan in the 17th century, via @tkasasagi.
This recent Unicode-proposal about 8-bit character sets is a great initiative, although it only includes platforms that were popular in USA and UK. For now. ;) The uncredited PETSCII Darth Vader is by Ailadi, btw.
