Genuinely curious!

Are you talking about AFP fonts[1]? In that case Sonoran Sans Serif[2]? Then you should probably be happy with Arial[3]. Fun story[4].

Or are you talking about a 3270 font? Then you should have a look at 3270font[5]

[1] https://www-01.ibm.com/servers/resourcelink/svc00100.nsf/pag...

[2] https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype=c...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial

[4] http://idsgn.org/posts/sonoran-the-hidden-truths/

[5] https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font

...and then I saw the username i was responding to. I'll post anyway if you do not want to toot your own horn. Nice work!

Thank you. I'm partial for that certain modern sans-serif look, as you may have guessed.

BTW, that IBM bundles Arial with their mainframes is outrageous. If you are paying more than a million dollars for a machine, you should be getting proper Helvetica.

Honestly, I would find it extremely limiting if someone was able to copyright 1664 bits of information. Bitmap 8x8 fonts are absolutely trivial. In one afternoon anyone could make every human readable variation.

Thinking on it: 1664 bits is 26 * 8 * 8, which is a little low. ASCII uses indices 32 to 127 for visible characters, so this would be 95 * 8 * 8, or 6080 bits. It's still a trivially small amount of information and there are very few ways to make unique English fonts out of it, so I still don't think it should be possible to copyright it.

Looking at the actual IBM_VGA_8x8.bin file: the file size is 1024 bytes (8192 bits). I calculated the entropy of the data to be only 638 bits of information.

MATLAB code:

  fid = fopen('IBM_PC_BIOS_1981-04-24_HALF_8x8.bin','r');
  ibmVga = fread(fid);
  fclose(fid);
  p = histogram(double(ibmVga),255);
  E = -sum(log2(p.Values(p.Values > 0)).*log2(p.Values(p.Values > 0)));

So I went on a bit of a rabbit hole on this one. The above code is wrong. I have since fixed it. It's the same idea with some added terms to normalize for data size.

Word size matters when calculating entropy. Calculating entropy on this file using 2 to 64 bits nets a minimum information of 860 bits using a 64 bit word size. Moving past a 64 bit word size requires rethinking some things. MATLAB doesn't have great support for data sizes greater than 64 bits (and I'm certain the performance impact would be great).

  words = double(unique(X))';
  binEdges = [words-0.5; words+0.5];
  binEdges = unique(binEdges(:));
  P = histcounts(X, binEdges) / M;
  P(P == 0) = [];
  M = numel(X);
  H = -sum(P .* log(P) ./ log(max([nBits, 2]))) / nBits * log2(max([nBits, 2]));
  E = H * M * nBits;

Counterpoint, 2^638 is a large number. So a particular 638 bits is very particular.

This is meaningless. Information is information. Specifying a size has virtually no information. The number "638" stored in uint16 has two bits of information using any word size between 8 and 15 bits.

128 bits a reasonable bound for "nontrivial information" (information you'd never arrive at by guessing). 1664 bits is enough to write a short poem.

However I don't think a 1664 bits is an accurate count. You must subtract the information provided by knowing it represents the alphabet, which constrains the number of possibilities to only a few choices per letter - say 2 or 3 bits at most. So a 64-character alphabet is right on the edge of "reasonably nontrivial", due entirely down to the combinatorial complexity of choosing which glyph to use in each case. A single glyph should not be copyrightable.

The size of the work doesn't matter. What matters is what it is. This comment is protected by copyright and is 1048 bits of UTF-8.

Names of things can be protected by trademark, not by copyright.

re: copyright-ability of fonts. That's a muddy area. The visual representation of the font cannot be copyrighted. I can make a font that looks like yours with no copyright concern. If I copy the code that creates the visual representation (i.e. the binary definition of the font) that may be a concern. That could be considered program code (particularly for vector fonts, but I could see an attorney trying to argue that for bitmaps, similar to assets for a game), which is protected by copyright.

As a bitmap, there is only one possible representation for that geometry at that given size, so I'd assume it's not possible to protect it.

It is my understanding that typeface hint systems such as those in Adobe Type 1 and TrueType are "programs" for the purposes of copyright law. But I'm not a lawyer, and I would be interested to hear expert opinions. It used to be my interest to deal with typeface hints.

perhaps they thought the serifs would be better suited for word processing