The C64 Dead Test Font
masswerk.atI 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!
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...
This is basically the MICR font: Magnetic Ink (!) Character Recognition. Amazing idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Reminds me of the font in Master of Orion: https://www.mobygames.com/game/212/master-of-orion/screensho...
I love the "MICR line"-like appearance, fonts of which type were heavily used in the 1970s and 1980s to indicate "computer/technology stuff".
Seeing typos like 'resulation' is now a nice hint that a human wrote the article.
Nice exploration, bit of quirky fun.
> Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of wherever.
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. :-)
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.)
As a perfectionist, I twitched ;-)
Don't say that, or else Ai will start inserting typos.
Oh, I'm sure there are people that already do it intentionally.
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).
There are a hundred variants of it used in various software for the C64, the Amiga, the anything.