4 ms·

Reminds me how bad anti-aliasing on the fonts was back then.

by jpkeisala 11y ago

eggie 11y ago
It is impressive how far that's come. It would be nice to do this again on modern systems.
- nindalf 11y ago
  I guess its possible to ask all of these people, apart from Dennis Ritchie :(
Narishma 11y ago
More like non-existent than bad.
- Symbiote 11y ago
  Anti-aliasing was first introduce to a personal computer in 1989, on the Acorn Archimedes. [1] My father only used Archimedes machines, so when we first got a Windows PC in ~1996 we both spent ages trying to make the text look nice — we assumed we had to find a setting somewhere. I couldn't find a good screenshot of an older system, so I made one [2]. The desktop font isn't anti-aliased, only the fonts in applications. I've used the included (in ROM) !Draw to write text, successive lines are offset by one pixel to the right. Also shown is the configuration dialogue, and the interactive help for it. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20131020231733/http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/docs/Mags/PCW/PCW_Jan89_RISCOS.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20131020231733/http://acorn.chris... [2] http://i.imgur.com/bS1u5NF.png http://i.imgur.com/bS1u5NF.png
ajross 11y ago
Heh, "anti-aliasing". Pretty much without exception (I didn't exhaustively check) these are bitmap fonts. They were hand designed glyph-by-glyph for display on a monochrome monitor. I spend the bulk of 1993-2003 or so staring at text windows made up almost exclusively of the X11 "9x15" font. It's really not bad at all, and occasionally I still fire up an xterm in that just for kicks. Note also that a lot of what you're identifying as "antialiasing" is simple pixel size. You could certainly generate a nicely-filtered font with a pixel height on 15 on modern systems, but on most displays it would be unreadably small. Typical programmers are working with fonts with literally twice the resolution these days.

4 ms·

Reminds me how bad anti-aliasing on the fonts was back then.

by jpkeisala 11y ago

Reminds me how bad anti-aliasing on the fonts was back then.

eggie 11y ago
It is impressive how far that's come. It would be nice to do this again on modern systems.
- nindalf 11y ago
  I guess its possible to ask all of these people, apart from Dennis Ritchie :(
Narishma 11y ago
More like non-existent than bad.
- Symbiote 11y ago
  Anti-aliasing was first introduce to a personal computer in 1989, on the Acorn Archimedes. [1] My father only used Archimedes machines, so when we first got a Windows PC in ~1996 we both spent ages trying to make the text look nice — we assumed we had to find a setting somewhere. I couldn't find a good screenshot of an older system, so I made one [2]. The desktop font isn't anti-aliased, only the fonts in applications. I've used the included (in ROM) !Draw to write text, successive lines are offset by one pixel to the right. Also shown is the configuration dialogue, and the interactive help for it. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20131020231733/http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/docs/Mags/PCW/PCW_Jan89_RISCOS.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20131020231733/http://acorn.chris... [2] http://i.imgur.com/bS1u5NF.png http://i.imgur.com/bS1u5NF.png
ajross 11y ago
Heh, "anti-aliasing". Pretty much without exception (I didn't exhaustively check) these are bitmap fonts. They were hand designed glyph-by-glyph for display on a monochrome monitor. I spend the bulk of 1993-2003 or so staring at text windows made up almost exclusively of the X11 "9x15" font. It's really not bad at all, and occasionally I still fire up an xterm in that just for kicks. Note also that a lot of what you're identifying as "antialiasing" is simple pixel size. You could certainly generate a nicely-filtered font with a pixel height on 15 on modern systems, but on most displays it would be unreadably small. Typical programmers are working with fonts with literally twice the resolution these days.