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Comment by wink | Hacker News Reader

OK, does anyone actually remember if half of the systems of the 80s really had such perfect font rendering or is this just some emulation 'current version'?

The first computers I used were 486 with DOS and early Pentiums with Windows 3.11 and nothing looked nearly as nice. Some of those old screenshots look A LOT better than stuff 10 years later that I used (incl MacOS 8 or 9).

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Older OSs had pixel fonts, which were carefully hand-crafted --- vector fonts were something which folks dreamed about having, or which were accessed when using incredibly expensive printers.

Font rendering on Windows 3.11 was pretty decent, so long as one used the nicer TrueType fonts --- Times New Roman and Arial had man _years_ of hinting effort by Monotype which kicked in at typically screen sizes --- that said, certain apps would still use the older pixel fonts Tms Rmn and Helv (over which Linotype sued for trademark infringement which is part of why Monotype got the contract) as well as the "vector fonts" Roman and Modern which are (one can still access them in Windows 11) stick/plotter fonts like to the Hershey fonts. When I bought my copy of Windows 3.0, I drove almost 100 miles into Richmond to get a copy of Adobe Type Manager 1.0 for Windows.

RISC OS (1987) had built-in support for anti-aliased vector fonts, though they aren't shown in the screenshot. The OS was in ROM and had insufficient space for the actual fonts so they needed to be loaded from disk. This was fine if you had a hard disk but a pita with floppies.

Need to find the time to try that out on a Raspberry Pi....

You really do. It is pretty much a work of art.

I have tried to persuade people a few times now. This may amuse.

2022:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/21/risc-os-is-3...

2024:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/05/02/risc-os-open...

I wish I could get the senior GNOME team to use RISC OS for a while. It is so very visible that GNOME >= 3.x is a Windows copy with things removed and re-arranged, because that's all anyone on board has seen or knows.

For me, my high-water mark for GUI experience/consistency was using Go Corp.'s PenPoint OS on an NCR-3125 when mobile, and a NeXT Cube (w/ a Wacom ArtZ) when at my desk --- nothing since has been as nice and consistent and reliable.

I believe you.

I never touched a real PenPoint device, sadly. I never got to use a real NeXT cube -- they were formidably expensive over on my side of the Atlantic, the price of a _high end_ new car before I could afford a car at all.

I own an original copy of NeXTstep with manuals and have run it inside Previous, but it's not the same.

Well, the NCR-3125 I was using got donated to the Smithsonian, so there's that.... My Kindle Scribe makes me a little sad every time I use it.

Mac OS X of course gets one the underpinnings of NeXTstep, but the UI has gotten kind of weird since 10.6.8 which was the last version I used regularly, making me wish that there was a "No iPad influence" checkbox for the UI.

That said, I'm glad to still be able to run Macromedia FreeHand/MX, and of course, modern hardware is just magical in terms of processing power, esp. for 3D.... but the way styluses have been crippled in Windows since Fall Creator's Update makes me a little angry every time I have to toggle stylus behaviour when switching apps (I actually leave the Settings app open) --- at least Firefox has a checkbox for disabling a stylus scrolling....

> My Kindle Scribe makes me a little sad every time I use it.

I played with a 30something friend's brand new ReMarkable a few years ago. I was torn between tears and rage. It is so miserable and dumb and primitive. I own 2 Newtons. The poor guy was shocked and baffled by my reaction.

Yes, I agree, Snow Leopard was peak OS X. Riccardo Mori wrote eloquently about this:

https://morrick.me/archives/9220

Yeah, managed to resist the ReMarkable --- the Kindle made the grade (rather than an Onyx BooX or something similar) because I already had a Paperwhite and I was pretty sure I could just default to e-book reading and get a decent value. That said, my next tech indulgence is a toss-up between either a Daylight Computer, or a Movink Pad. The DC seems like to the closest thing to a Newton alternative (other than a cell phone w/ a stylus such as my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+)

If I had managed to snag an Axiotron ModBook, I'd almost certainly still be using it w/ Snow Leopard.

The monitors of the time were a lot blurrier than the screen you're looking at the screenshots on. For maximum verisimilitude you'd have to have photographs of screens.

I got an 800x600 LCD monitor in about 1999, and it was a massive upgrade.

It's a tradeoff. A 800x600 CRT will look "blurry" compared to a LCD when rendering old-style GUIs or text in a properly hinted font, but the 800x600 LCD will look blocky and pixelated when rendering a real-world photorealistic image compared to the CRT. The real look of that CRT is more like taking that old 800x600 photo and upscaling it to 1440x1080 on a modern FullHD display. Blurry to be sure, but not blocky or pixelated. Early LCDs also had terrible image persistence/ghosting issues that showed up when playing games.

I think the factor here is that the screens were CRTs.

Font rendering was better. Today the fonts are scaled up or down or both and the rendering is hit or miss.

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