By the way, Windows has its own terminal font: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_(typeface)
Another similar one is Fixedsys, the oldest font in Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixedsys
The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
51–60 of 67 posts
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#52I made an AwesomeWM theme last month using these. I gave up on it, too hard on the eyes ;) http://i.imgur.com/LDSOade.png (code at https://github.com/Elv13/ , but that particular theme isn't pushed yet as it require upstream patches still in the CI)
That's why old programmers wear glasses.
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also help on composite displays, still a significant consideration at the time the PC was created. PAL didn't suffer too much from this, but NTSC did. Single pixel verticals light up in a rainbow of color. This is actually how the monochrome Apple 2 did it's color graphics! White on blue is a secondary helper here. On sharp displays, the human eye sees the white text at full detail. Humans have only a fraction o…
I think the only PC ever to ship with composite video output was the PC Jr. (edit: sadly, no, it wasn't) I became fond of the white on blue scheme with the MSX machines, but kind of abandoned it when I moved to PCs.
Not only did the CGA have composite out, but by playing with the signal timings it was possible for a CGA to output more colors than the four nasty "CGA palette" colors it's known for (no matter which palette you use, shit's nasty) to a composite monitor.
The demoscene prod "8088MPH" demonstrates this to spectacular effect.
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I had similar experiences. That Videx card really shined. At NTSC timings, 80 column text is basically color information. It's just terrible. Interestingly, sets from about the 80's onward can display 80 column text nicely, given a good DAC driven signal. The signals from back then were square, or coarse, if not square. This makes NTSC light right up. I've been toying with a micro and a DAC and a full interlace,…
> As we got Y-C capable displays, one could just use a resistor and send the composite signal into both inputs. This actually did very seriously improve text. This is something I should try with my 8-bit machines.
It works pretty well. Put a pot on the C line, and adjust it for the best overall look.
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi folks, thanks for the suggestions. I know about pragmata pro and unifont. I've tried Unifont, I think it hurt my eyes a bit but it sure has lots of glyphs. Pragmata is very pretty and has great coverage but it's not free and I don't see that it has more glyphs than free fonts, for instance with DejaVu mono I have a subscript for j which I don't see in Pragmata. Or, the APL glyphs for instance; unifont has them too…
Do you know TeX/LaTeX? If not, sounds like you should learn it. It's all my mathy friends use for taking notes.
I know, but haven't used, La/Tex. I'll need to use it at some point, but for note-taking I prefer plain text files, as I use- except for paper notebooks.
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know TeX/LaTeX? If not, sounds like you should learn it. It's all my mathy friends use for taking notes.
I know, but haven't used, La/Tex. I'll need to use it at some point, but for note-taking I prefer plain text files, as I use- except for paper notebooks.
Most implementations of markdown allow inline La/Tex and HTML, this is the best of both world. You have plain text notes and the power to inline some math.
I would also suggest iPython notebook (if you can live with web apps, I don't) as it allow you to see what you write in real time and add some code too (and being able to use mathplotlib). That being said, I used computer to take note in high school (The KDE3 version of basket notepad, the evernote of 2006, now defunct), but switched back to pen and paper for college, formatting was much easier ;)
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the only PC ever to ship with composite video output was the PC Jr. (edit: sadly, no, it wasn't) I became fond of the white on blue scheme with the MSX machines, but kind of abandoned it when I moved to PCs.
Most PC CGA cards offered composite output. One could use a TV or higher resolution composite monitor and skip the expensive CGA one. I did this, as did a number of others I knew at the time.
Yeah... the original PC could be scaled way down in terms of hardware. It had a cassette interface and ROM BASIC, so it didn't need floppy disks, the CGA could connect to a TV via an RF modulator, and it was available with as little as 16K of RAM. In other words - home computer level specs. That said, where it differentiated itself was its upgradability and software selection, so there wasn't much point to the most basic PC configurations.
To show the other end of the original PC spectrum, my family's first PC was a Compaq portable (a clone of an IBM PC), bought in the late 80's. That machine had 2 5.25" 360K floppy disk drives, 20MB Hard Disk, an 8087 FPU, 1200 baud modem, a mouse, and a higher-than-CGA resolution display for text. It was really a nice machine, and when I last checked a few years ago, it still runs.
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most PC CGA cards offered composite output. One could use a TV or higher resolution composite monitor and skip the expensive CGA one. I did this, as did a number of others I knew at the time.
I guess that having a nice separate character generator ROM for use with their TTL monitore (both for the CGA and the MDA) wound increase the cost. Damn bean counters. I remember the frustration that my Apple II+ with Videx card (plugged to a monochrome monitor through composite) had nicer looking text than the IBM (mono CGA on RGBi) next to it. Even more infuriating, it was also better than the much better specced A…
Yeah... IBM CGA text wasn't that good even in the best of circumstances. The 640x200 resolution and 8x8 character cells were really inadequate.
Part of the reason for this is that IBM split the market into CGA for graphics and MDA for better text (9x14 character cell). Because the MDA adapter didn't display graphics, IBM made it possible to run both a CGA and a MDA in the same machine. Software like Lotus 1-2-3 could put the spreadsheet on the MDA and the graphics on the CGA. Dual monitors in the mid-80's.
Prior to the development of the EGA and VGA, there were a few interesting competitive responses to IBM's CGA/MDA split. The first was the Hercules card. This would let customers that had bought IBM's MDA (and it's matching monitor) get access to graphics. It wasn't compatible with CGA graphics, but it was higher resolution and wound up being fairly widely supported where it mattered. Compaq also had a solution to the problem... they shipped adapter/monitor pairs that could display MDA-quality text in the text modes and would scale down to 640x200 to display graphics.
What ultimately wound up happening is pretty much what you'd expect. As graphics resolutions got better with EGA and VGA, the quality of text on color displays got to the point where the MDA didn't represent an improvement. That said, there was always the ability to run an MDA (or clone) in parallel with a EGA, VGA, etc... that configuration was useful to programmers because it let you put debug information on one display while the main display ran the software you were developing.
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the only PC ever to ship with composite video output was the PC Jr. (edit: sadly, no, it wasn't) I became fond of the white on blue scheme with the MSX machines, but kind of abandoned it when I moved to PCs.
Not only did the CGA have composite out, but by playing with the signal timings it was possible for a CGA to output more colors than the four nasty "CGA palette" colors it's known for (no matter which palette you use, shit's nasty) to a composite monitor. The demoscene prod "8088MPH" demonstrates this to spectacular effect.
It was also very simple to just use the 640x480 graphics mode on a composite display. US NTSC color cycles 160 times in that display area, which yields 4 pixels per cycle.
That's a 16 color, any color any pixel display 160x200.
Some PC games offered this option. It should have been in the CGA spec. For memory reasons, 1 and 2 bits per pixel were common. However, the same amount of RAM offers the full color set at a reasonable, if modest, resolution. (For the period)
16 colors on a 160x200 display was considered "nice" at that time, and having it be official would have improved early PC gaming considerably.
Re: The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know, but haven't used, La/Tex. I'll need to use it at some point, but for note-taking I prefer plain text files, as I use- except for paper notebooks.
Most implementations of markdown allow inline La/Tex and HTML, this is the best of both world. You have plain text notes and the power to inline some math. I would also suggest iPython notebook (if you can live with web apps, I don't) as it allow you to see what you write in real time and add some code too (and being able to use mathplotlib). That being said, I used computer to take note in high school (The KDE3 vers…
I'm thinking of giving markdown a try, for the reasons you say, but I'm not sure how the maths notation looks like when it's not rendered. I think it's all escaped characters, in which case it won't be as readable as plain text, even with rare glyphs that need special fonts.
Some text editors even let you enter rare characters with key combinations (frex, Vim's digraphs). The end result is pretty much WYSIWIG mathematical notation.
Here's an example from my machine learning class notes:
⎛ ₙ ⎞ ⎝ ⁱ⁼⁰ ⎠
That's what I'm going on about- but there's not enough super/subscripts in ASCII itself. :)