I started designing fonts around 1987 on an 8-bit Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Many years later, my involvement in the Spectrum emulation scene led aul Dunn to ask me if I could provide fonts for his excellent BASIN Sinclair BASIC for Windows. My interest in 8x8 fonts was suitably rekindled, and I ended up delivering about 60 - some even extracted from my original +3 disk images.

I wanted to get these fonts online earlier! Raw 7698-byte files, however, are only of use to BASIN users or those suitably familiar with the convoluted process and tools to get them into a Spectrum or emulator. Even trying to use them on Windows was a pain given that TrueType only cares about scalable fonts (SBIT embedded bitmaps are rare these days).

A series of posts on system fonts:

It’s been a while since I visited the bitmap fonts of old computers (see the bottom of the post for links), there are still some to evaluate!

A series of posts on system fonts:

I’ve been wanting to do a follow-up to the popular system fonts posts for some time and recent HackerNews and ArsTechnica traffic reminded me that I’m not the only one nostalgic for chunky pixel fonts of old.

A series of posts on system fonts:

With the 8-bit system fonts post being so popular I just had to jump right in and look at the system fonts available on the 16-bit machines!

A series of posts on system fonts:

My love of typography originated in the 80’s with the golden years of 8-bit home computing and their 8×8 pixel monospaced fonts on low-resolution displays.

Computing history tells us of a mythical place where many of the innovations we take for granted today were either invented or refined to a working level at a single location known as the Xerox’s Palo-Alto Research Center (PARC).

These discoveries form the basis of much of the technology we use today and include the desktop metaphor, the graphical user interface, laser printers, object orientation and Ethernet.

Some of my older bitmap “pixel” font files are now available again, they are:

I also have about 20 pixel fonts from my Spectrum days that I am intending on bringing across to Windows FON format in the near future.

It’s been a long time coming but finally – a TrueType conversion of my programming font Envy Code B.

It’s still a pixelated font so will only look good at 10pt (on Windows, 13pt on the Mac). There is no bold or italic variants but this should be enough to get it into those elusive TTF-only applications like CodeSmith and Flash.

My conversion of the Palm OS system font – as seen on the Palm Pilot – is now available for download. I’ve re-created the original 7 point normal font, the 7 point bold and the 11 point larger text from Palm OS screen-shots.

If you need a really small proportional font that’s nice to read this could be what you’re looking for.

This month has seen my Envy Code A and Envy Code B fonts stumbled upon some 4,000 times thanks to a Digg to Keith Deven’s programming fonts page that links here.

I’ve taken this opportunity to update the fonts – Envy Code B had a couple of issues with mis-positioned characters in the 9pt version especially with “il#” characters in the bold one. Fixed.