There was that great quote from Steve Jobs saying that the only reason modern computers had decent fonts is because he dropped in on a calligraphy class once and it stayed with him until they made the first Macs, which were then copied by Windows.
The Xerox Alto had multiple high-quality proportionally spaced fonts, along with the first WYSIWYG document editor (developed by Simonyi, who later wrote Word at Microsoft). This was two years before the Apple I, let alone the Mac. The credit for good fonts in computers should go to Xerox PARC, not a calligraphy class at Reed.
The point is the class made him care about typography and he pushed so Apple computers would have good-looking text.
As opposed to Windows, which did not at the time.
And to a point, this is still true. It's surprisingly hard to get good text rendering in terminal emulators on Windows and Linux. I still have to settle for "good enough" rather than the "stellar" I can get on my OS X machine.
Comments
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only programmer who has an interest in typography.
There was that great quote from Steve Jobs saying that the only reason modern computers had decent fonts is because he dropped in on a calligraphy class once and it stayed with him until they made the first Macs, which were then copied by Windows.
The Xerox Alto had multiple high-quality proportionally spaced fonts, along with the first WYSIWYG document editor (developed by Simonyi, who later wrote Word at Microsoft). This was two years before the Apple I, let alone the Mac. The credit for good fonts in computers should go to Xerox PARC, not a calligraphy class at Reed.
The point is the class made him care about typography and he pushed so Apple computers would have good-looking text.
As opposed to Windows, which did not at the time.
He wasn't claiming he invented decent fonts on a computer.
And to a point, this is still true. It's surprisingly hard to get good text rendering in terminal emulators on Windows and Linux. I still have to settle for "good enough" rather than the "stellar" I can get on my OS X machine.
Steve was a humble guy
On HN/Reddit, everyone has an interest in it. In real life, not so much :-)
Also I guess it depends on what kind of programming... frontend devs probably care more about it than embedded devs.
How do you feel about the pico8?