Type Design Like It’s 1987

A live demo by me of early font editors on a real Macintosh Plus for Type Tuesday, a group that gets together for type related events in Minneapolis. Recorded on the evening of June 11, 2024 at the Minneapolis Central Library.
There was also a brief demo after my talk where we printed to a vintage Apple ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer. Unfortunately, I forgot to point the camera at the printer, so the video footage wasn't usable. The group got a kick out of seeing it in action and hearing it go "zzzzzzt zzzzzzt zzzzzzt" as it slowly formed the image. Many thanks to Hans Koch for bringing it.

[@tub8r]

Where's Papyrus?

[@marksimonson74]

Pre-Papyrus. But you could get it in Letraset transfer lettering.

[@tub8r]

Thank you for entertaining my semi-joking question. But Papyrus was released (incl. Letraset transfer sheets) around 85-87. And I was thinking one could've used those transfer sheets as facsimile for tracing fonts like you demoed. Of course before the major inclusion of Papyrus in MS Office font pack at the turn of the century nobody knew or cared about it. With this desktop publishing and type creation explosion like you've illustrated there were so many interesting options at the time.

[@sideburn]

Everywhere 😂

[@eedle.bendhaardt]

WHERE ARE THE TURTLESSSS!??

[@sideburn]

Flying Toasters: 0:10

[@marksimonson74]

I wondered if anyone would notice. On hindsight, I should have used the Flying Toasters as a background on the title screen. It popped up on the projector screen before the talk and got a lot of comments and laughs from the attendees.

[@sideburn]

@@marksimonson74 haha can’t go wrong with giant flying toasters!

[@sideburn]

Also amazing you had those photos from the 80s

[@pamdemonia]

My college boyfriend had an original mac and an apple 27 pin printer (which meant it could print fonts with kerning and SERIFS). Printing out a standard college paper of around 12 pages at the higher resolution took around 45 minutes or so, and I am convinced that those serifs bumped my grades up at least one full grade. Very interesting walk down memory lane.

[@moeskido]

I kept wanting to shush that guy in the audience, but then I realized that'd be me if I'd been there. Except I'd be louder. :) Great look back at a process I partly lived through as well, starting with my first Mac in 1990. Illustrator, Photoshop, then QuarkXpress. Wish I'd messed around with the early font editors more, but I was more interested in page layout than type design.

[@teleportkontrola2006]

This is gold, thanks Mark!

[@luserdroog]

The bitmap is not the bitterritory.

[@teamflashtv]

Very enjoyable presentation.

[@ChopsticksDIYGarden]

In the late '80s to early '90s, I was in college and became interested in creating Vietnamese fonts. I did quite a bit of research at the time and experimented with PostScript and various font encodings.

[@marksimonson74]

That must have been tricky in the pre-Unicode days.

[@ChopsticksDIYGarden]

@@marksimonson74 Yes, it was tricky, especially since different groups tried to create their own encodings. We had VISCII, TCVN3, VIQR, VNI, and so on. Fortunately, UTF-8 gained popularity and is widely used today. The downside is that some people still use VNI fonts with UTF-8 encoding and wonder why the fonts don't look right. Hopefully, the VNI fonts will eventually go away as new fonts are likely to be UTF-8.

[@rolandcrosby]

wait a minute, the magazine blurb 10 minutes in was written by Marc Benioff?

[@marksimonson74]

That's weird. I never noticed. He would have been in college. Seems possible. FWIW, he's not listed as a regular contributing writer or editor in the magazine.

[@fernandodiaz5303]

Wow, this is amazing! And I thought FontLab 5 was a nightmare :P

[@locoluis1978]

The Atari 8-bit computers can display multiple character sets at a given time through the use of Display List Interrupts, though each character set takes 1 KB (128 8×8 glyphs), you can't change them mid-line, and the Atari 800 originally only had 8 KB of RAM (it was later expanded to 48 KB; later Atari 8-bit models had more RAM).

[@marksimonson74]

Yeah, I'm well aware of that, but I didn't want to get off in the weeds, given the audience. Technically speaking, you _could_ do arbitrarily positioned bitmap text with different fonts, sizes and styles on other computers at the time in a particular program, but it wasn't the default state of the computer the way it was on the Mac. Later there were things like Windows and GEOS, of course. I remember there was a T: display driver for the Atari that did this to some extent, but at the cost of speed and memory.

[@qwe1231]

Memories. I had a Mac Plus with an acelerator card put in it (doubling the clock speed), but then I had to buy a Kensington Macsaver fan that slotted on top to keep it cool.

[@marksimonson74]

I had a "fan hat" for mine at some point for the same reason. Not the most elegant look.

[@qwe1231]

@@marksimonson74 When I later upgraded to a Duo 230 (with a DuoDock) I was chagrined to see that the processor in my NEC Silentwriter laser printer used the same chip as the Mac laptop, but with twice the clockspeed. I marvel at how I got real work done back then.

[@marksimonson74]

@@qwe1231 I had a Duo 230 and DuoDock as well. 🙂

[@thegoodkids-jackson2786]

Important work to share the history of digital type especially from someone who experienced it! Thanks so much!

[@sparkleglitch13]

This was great Mark, thanks for sharing

[@Regular-ls2yi]

Thnk you so so mutchhhhh :)