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0 pointstwelvechairs10y ago0 comments

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.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

kens10y ago· 2 in thread

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.

throwaway643610y ago

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.

kqr10y ago

> 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.

arcanus10y ago

Steve was a humble guy

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