8x19 Text Mode Font Origins

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/8x19-text-mode-font-origins/

by userbinator • 11 months ago

73 29 11 months ago

michalpleban4• 11 months ago

Something I was wondering while reading the article: why? Why would you create a 8x19 font if you already have a 8x16 don't? The answer is: so that you can use a standard 640x480 VGA resolution instead of of 640x400 to display 25 lines of text.

fredoralive• 11 months ago

Of course that asks the question of why use the graphics mode for text, which I would suspect was simply to show the seemingly obligatory Energy Star logo, but these Intel boards don’t have it.

bananaboy2• 11 months ago

This apparently was a text mode not a graphics mode. It would have been a tweaked text mode since the standard mode 3 text mode that you can set via int 10h is 720x400.

The energy star logo was also displayed in text modes - by using custom font glyphs!

michalpleban4• 11 months ago

It's not a graphics mode. It is just a resolution from the graphics mode, repurposed for the text mode. The reason possibly being the 640x480 resolution is universally supported while 720x400 is not - for example my HDMI TV can still display 640x480.

martijnvds• 11 months ago

The Energy Star logo tended to be made up of custom characters in text mode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAHGKanqO6s

jefftk• 11 months ago

I'm still confused: why not stick with 8x16 and go from 25 to 30 lines of text? Is it that you need to support both 640x480 and 640x400?

spogbiper• 11 months ago

There was a long legacy of using 80x25 and lots of software that would assume this layout. I think that comes from an even older legacy of dumb terminals such as the VT100 that used 80x24 plus one line for a status line. BTW 80 columns comes from an even older legacy of IBM punch cards having 80 columns. Basically, anything that wasn't 80x25 was going to break a lot of things

michalpleban4• 11 months ago

Because 80x25 uses 4kB of RAM (one byte for character + another byte for attributes) whereas 80x30 would grow beyond 4kB so you would need 8kB. Maybe not a big deal in a VGA card, but everything was standardized on 80x25 from the olden days of MDA/CGA which had little video memory, so a lot of software expected that.

Plus, making the characters shorter would make them also a bit less legible.

JdeBP• 11 months ago

For the execution environment in which firmware SETUP ran, there were often hardwired assumptions, particularly in the parts of SETUP that provide full-screen TUIs with menus and entryfields and pop-up help boxes and whatnot, that the screen was 25 rows high.

Also remember that SETUP as a whole was often a mess of different ROM programs from different manufacturers. Far too many thought it their own ROM's business to clear the display and set text mode before they splashed their copyright strings, prompts, self-test, and hardware auto-detection information up.

Yes, they could have done things properly. The way to detect an existing screen size was there from the VGA onwards. And they could have left the display uncleared. And the whole preserve-my-graphical-splash-screen thing eventually did happen.

They did not.

0points• 11 months ago

Because standard.

There was also small .com utils circulating that would change to a tiny font so you could have 40, 50 rows of text with tiny fonts, or maybe even more.

p1necone• 11 months ago

Is it that you need to support both 640x480 and 640x400

Probably.

A lot of software back then was rendering UIs with box drawing characters, doing complicated layout etc - it's probably much easier to retrofit existing software to output the exact same thing in a slightly higher resolution font than to make the display logic support different resolutions properly.

ape4• 11 months ago

I am oddly happy that there's an OS/2 museum

masfuerte2• 11 months ago

This article [1] has a little more information about the font. Supposedly it first appeared in "Intel's Hi-Flex BIOS".

The source for the font appears here [2] with an Intel copyright.

[1] https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/PhoenixBIOS_4.0_Release_6....

[2] https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-codereview/blob/0a5f23c06d...

ronsor• 11 months ago

Important reminder that bitmap fonts are not copyrightable in the United States of America.

masfuerte2• 11 months ago

It's more complicated in the UK but font-related copyrights "only" last for 25 years, so 1990s fonts are well clear now.

Aardwolf• 11 months ago

There are many aspect ratios of fixed width fonts (see https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/), from square to rectangular, and this one is more than twice as tall as wide

Is there any info or research on which width/height ratio of a fixed width font is the best for readability?

duskwuff• 11 months ago

Don't forget that a lot of old PC graphics modes weren't 1:1. 640x200 was a thing, for example - the pixel ratio is 3.2:1, but it gets vertically stretched to a standard 4:3. An 8x8 font wouldn't look square in that graphics mode.

phalanx104• 11 months ago

0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,1,1,0,1,1,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0, 1,1,0,0,0,1,1,0, 0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0, 0,1,1,0,1,1,0,0, 0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0, 0,0,1,1,1,0,0,0, 0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0, 0,0,1,1,1,0,0,0, 0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0, 0,1,1,0,1,1,0,0, 0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0, 0,1,1,0,1,1,0,0, 0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0, 1,1,0,0,0,1,1,0, 0,1,1,0,0,1,1,0, 1,1,0,0,0,1,1,0, 0,1,1,0,1,1,1,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,

wpollock• 11 months ago

HN is family friendly. Please don't use such language!

EvanAnderson• 11 months ago

Aside: Going down the "memory lane" of Intel motherboard codenames was fun. Tuscon II, Anchorage, Atlanta, Seattle, Maui, etc.

I really enjoyed Intel's desktop boards. They weren't particularly flashy, and there were certainly "duds" in there (early MU440EX revs not handling Pentium II CPUs properly, the whole RAMBUS debacle) but in general Intel made a solid (and not at all flashy) board.

With Intel's manufacturing competency you could be assured every board would be consistent. If there was a defect (I'm looking at you, MTH in the 820 chipset) every board would consistently have the same defect.

8x19 Text Mode Font Origins

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