The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack | Hacker News Reader

The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

int10h.org

124 pointsOuterVale15 comments

Another classic console font is the GPLv2 Solarize 12x29 PSF young'un oldschool font from Sun SPARCstation via Linux safekeeping, https://github.com/talamus/solarize-12x29-psf & https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2356167&s=f531b970...

  Origins of this font can be traced to the Sun Microsystems SPARCstation console. In some early days of Linux development that font was donated to be a part of the Linux kernel.. Characters: Latin, Greek, Cryillic, Pinyin.

The Corona is my favorite font at https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?cordata_...

On FreeBSD the SPARC console font is called “gallant” by the way and is easy to use if installed: vidcontrol -f 8x16 gallant

I get the nostalgia, but even back in the day I though that the "standard" PC text mode font was really ugly. With a little bit more effort, IBM could have made everyone's life a little bit more pleasant, but they didn't.

As it turns out, it’s actually a quite beautiful font. It doesn’t make any sense, but it is. Like… It is its own aesthetic paradigm?

There aren't that many choices when it comes to drawing the letter "A" on an 8x6 pixel grid...

I don't think the font designers had much option for pretty.

Excellent. Even looking at that page brings me back to DOS days.

BTW, what’s everyone’s favorite NFO viewer?

With this font pack, LiteXL/Pragtical would probably do a great job, BRB gotta test it.

Used to just use EDIT or ACIDDRAW

We need these fonts in .psf format for the linux console.

Maybe super-sized versions for 4k displays. (I think that would be 48x90 or 48x86!)

i'd love to make a website with similar style. but i did not find any informations on the int10h website. anybody knows anything about it? (except of course just to make it myself)

There is https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386

> Free to use under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license

Really? Can you even copyright a font? As far as I know, fonts can't be copyrighted, meaning they can be used by anyone without needing a licence. IANAL, but it seems like font users aren't required to comply with attribution and share-alike requirements of the CC licence.

The shapes can't be copyrighted, apparently, but the bits that make up the digitalization can. IANAL, etc.

Bitmap fonts are not covered by copyright: <https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf>, <https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-443.pdf>

It is vector fonts, which can contain copyrightable code, which can be copyrighted.

So it would seem. Thanks for digging those up.

With vector fonts containing copyrightable code, are you referring to e.g. TrueType hinting, or OpenType shaping (or very avant-gardely, WASM shaping)? I should hope the glyph-drawing instructions don't fall under this definition of code, because that'd maybe mean SVG `path`s are copyrightable...

> With vector fonts containing copyrightable code, are you referring to

What specifics you can get is all described in ML-443.

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