Re:“Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal” (2013)
by rjsw on Saturday June 21, 2014 @08:02PM
(#7926425)
The MIT Lisp Machine source tree contains Times Roman and Helvetica fonts dating from 1977.
Re:“Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal” (2013)
by Curmudgel on Saturday June 21, 2014 @08:24PM
(#7926468)
I didn't mean to suggest that the Star was the first commercial computer that offered multiple fonts. I picked the Star because it came before the Macintosh there were good pictures of it available. I believe that the Alto also had a font that set a typeface in cursive, and even came with its own font editor, but I'd have to look harder to find videos or pictures of that.
Re:“Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal” (2013)
by rjsw on Sunday June 22, 2014 @11:05AM
(#7928007)
I think you were correct to identify the Star (or at least the prototype of it), The article on the history of Smalltalk that was posted yesterday gives a date of 1972 for the first Xerox PARC font editor.
What? First of all, I think that you're confusing typefaces and fonts. A computer font is computer code that describes how the size and shape, orientation, etc. of a collection of glyphs should be output onto the screen. Computers had successfully output text to a screen for decades before the Macintosh.
The Xerox Star, which came out in 1981, three years before the Apple Macintosh, had sans-serif and serif typefaces:
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-8...
The Macintosh might have been the first popular commercially available machine that offered several computer fonts, but Jobs certainly did not come up with the idea.