Raster CRT Typography According to DEC
masswerk.at
masswerk.at
Perhaps it was an early example of the DRY mantra being applied incorrectly.
A larger issue is the idea that, by choosing a small caps style for their font, TI were acting inexplicably or irrationally. It is worrying but not surprising that the HN crowd finds it disturbing when a company makes a creative decision that doesn't have a clear business case behind it, while being completely innocuous, and which potentially could have helped to differentiate their products. It's the typical negative engineer stereotype coming through: "No imagination or creativity allowed, except if it's to solve a specific problem".
I don't know about the Silent 700's font, but it looks to me like this probably wasn't a mistaken case of the DRY principle: after all, the TI-99's lower case letters are still stored as separate bitmaps (they are reproduced in an image here: http://electrickeet.com/line-itfont.html).
So it is clear, at least, that they had the storage for lower case, and for whatever reason decided to go with a small caps font. It isn't a result of a simple limitation that they hacked around by scaling bitmaps or something like that. I wouldn't like to speculate about what fraction of users found it odd at the time.
It appears to be a 5x7 font, which would mean little room to work in.
In my purely subjective experience, rise time seems to be shorter than fall time - pixels will usually be visibly blurred on the trailing (right) edge, but sharper on the leading (left) edge. Another thing I noticed is that a longer horizontal row of pixels will leave a longer decay on the trailing edge than a single pixel. For example, the Ts will usually have their horizontal line visibly stretched on the trailing edge, even when the vertical line seemed sharp.
Of course, purpose-built terminals might have used different phosphors than cheap TVs of the time. It might also have to do with video amp bandwidth, or something else electrical.
It appears to me that the rise/fall graphs are just graphs of ideal RC networks, while the whole true CRT system will have lots of other factors such as inductance going on.
When it comes to comparing what you might recall of CRT TVs and 80s micros to what a dedicated monochrome CRT would show, well, the dedicated CRT was much better and sharper, particularly if your color display technology involved a "composite" system like NTSC or PAL, where horizontal luminance (Y) bandwidth was SEVERELY limited to "make room for" the color information (I/Q).
To get an idea of how much Composite video encoding degraded picture information, take a look at modern videos of "RGB-modded" classic consoles such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpdpAxzjmA8 -- As far as I understand from the video explanation, both signals are video-captured, so this is not a "CRT effect", it's a "composite video effect" that makes the right-side image so smeared. There's also the palette difference, but that's more a matter of preference.
A classic example of this is when you play retro consoles on an authentic household TV verses VGA.
Some systems actually used this technique as an additional rendering trick. For example having a foreground sprite where every other pixel was invisible and those pixels would be blurred by the TV to give a more authentic looking transparency effect.
What I didn’t mention but is also worth noting is the quality of the input signal would have mattered as well. 8bit micro monitors, even in the 80s, generally took RGB input. Whereas any micro that output to a TV would often do so via a the antenna, ie the computer would have to be tuned in like a TV station. This means you then have all of your prime colour “wires” as well as audio mixed into one analogue signal. Which obviously degrades the overall image and sound quality. Plus TV tuning isn’t nearly as precise as having a proper dedicated cable. The devices from the 80s (and 90s) which supported both ANT and RGB really show just how significant the difference between the two is. Which is also why you often see a lot of retro gear being sold as “RGB modded”.
Basically what I’m saying is comparing a budget micro on an 80s home TV to a raster CRT terminal is rather pointless. Different tech, different target audience, different eras.
The slow decay of the phosphors is on an entirely different timescale: more on the order of the time taken to refresh the entire screen, rather than the time taken for the e-beam to sweep across a single pixel. The asymmetry in the phosphor's activation vs decay is vastly greater than the asymmetry in the electron gun's switching on and off.
It freaks out the IT guys and our workspace consultants, which is a bonus.
The only downside is that on macOS it crashes on quit. But since I'm quitting it anyway, no harm done.
Personally I found cool-retro-term lacked support for a few ANSI escape sequences I needed for tmux to work quite how I liked which prevented me using it as my daily $TERM. I’m sure with a bit of effort I could have gotten it working but it was an effort not work making when there’s literally dozens of other ${TERM}s I could use and the only thing in favour of cool-retro-term is novelty.
I do really like how cool-retro-term is an expansion of the acronym CRT. Clever project naming.
Because a typical terminal emulator doesn't make the brand new monitor they just installed look like it's broken.
So I’m guessing when you say “IT professionals freak out” what you actually mean is “idiot desktop support engineers who think anyone who uses the command line are ‘l33t h4xx0rz’”.
In which case they’d have a hernia if they saw the kind of workspace a typical non-poser runs.
You guessed wrong, since they're used to seeing me use iTerm all over my other monitors.
I'd like to see that for the "fixed" font used as the xterm default. I got addicted to this font, but pixels are getting smaller and my eyes are getting worse.
In the middle of a party in a hotel room, DIGEX announced: "OK, it's time to go down to the garage and bringing up all the VT52's from my car!" Trusting Doug unconditionally, several of us volunteered to help.
After we hauled a bunch of VT52's from the parking garage, through the hotel lobby, up the elevator, and back to the room, and set them down, Doug opened up one of the cases and announced:
"The great thing about VT52's is that if you take the printer module out, there's just enough room for a 6 pack of Guinness Stout bottles inside!"
To the best of my knowledge, the only IBM keyboards that could flat out prevent the keys from being pressed were ones based on the Selectric typewriter mechanism, such as the 2741
The Commodore 64 had a similar problem with single-pixel latency, which is why the vertical portions of its character ROM are all two pixels wide. Otherwise, the character would be too blurry to be read comfortably on televisions of the era.
I used to love making my own C-64 fonts pixel by pixel and comparing how they looked on a Panasonic portable TV versus my Commodore CM-141 monitor.
I'm a regular user of the glasstty font + the 'tritty'[1] utility which emulates serial line I/O to create the 'true unix terminal' experience.
Looking forward to the next post!
ps: improved smeary-220 font would be great :b
but yes, it is very crisp - i think the point of the 'fuzzing' details discussed here is that they actually help the overall clarity (e.g. a 'dithering' sort of effect)