Pinhead

This font started life as a conversion of the 1973 Wang 2200 minicomputer bitmap font. What surprised me was how it relied on the phosphor glow to give a nice effect despite being laden with gaps. This is really how all good fonts are designed — by modifying the input so the actual output on a real environment looks optimal.

Alas modern displays don’t have a phosphor glow and even mid-80s CRTs don’t glow enough for this to look sharp however it did bear a passing resemblance to 9-pin dot matrix prints such as that on the Epson FX series.

I took the Wang font and tweaked the glyphs a look to look like the FX but a lot of credit for this font belongs to Wang and the unknown designer in the first place.

In 2023 I added a PDP variant based on their screen font and a CBM variant based on a Commodore printer and then finally a Pica variant that is closer to the FX-80 printer than the original.