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The reason these fonts didn’t get much love is because growing up on ATARI ST’s, Commodore 64’s, Amigas and ZX Spectrums, the PC tin-bucket and his ugly fonts were synonymous with an overpriced, slow, loud, power hungry computer with extremely bad, inelegant hardware with vastly inferior capabilities. The PC bucket is and remains the butt of jokes to anyone who grew up on the non—IBM computers from the era or used real UNIX hardware.

When will we see those beatiful Sun OpenBoot PROM and sgi workstation firmware fonts remade as TTF’s? Much nicer to look at those.




The IBM terminals were a totally different story. A sans-serif, simple and elegant design, modern and yet timeless.

I reproduced the 3270's here: https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font


Those are pretty slick; a completely different deal than the PC bucket. IBM just didn’t have the insight nor the vision (as opposed to Hi-Toro and Jay Miner) to build a personal computer people would actually love and enjoy to use. It was a machine designed by a committee and it shows in the uglyness of the BIOS’ font. The terminals were a completely different world. I actually used them, Green monochrome monitor, IBM key clicking keyboard and all, although the termcap on Solaris 2.5.1 wasn’t quite right so I’d switch to a DEC VT220 as soon as one would be freed. Good times.


OpenBSD VT fonts are almost the same.

Check Luxi Mono for TTF fonts.

Also: https://us-east.manta.joyent.com/jmc/public/tmp/gallant12x22...


I recently noted Solaris 11 boots the console to the same they used with the SPARCStations.


It’s been that way since around 2012, not that it helped them after Snoracle’s abundant blunders.

It’d be really cool if they brought the Black-on-Gray console OBP font back to illumos though. That would be a treat.


Cool, I’ll check it out.




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