PDP PDF's !

[Randy Dawson]

> Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:36:20 -0600
> From: jules.richardson99 at gmail.com
> To: 
> Subject: Re: PDP PDF's !
> 
> Rich Alderson wrote:
> >> Are there any font historians in the audience? I'm curious what the
> >> serif font is that DEC used back then (both on the "Digital Equipment
> >> Corp" logo on the PDP-5, for example, and in the brochure for the
> >> PDP-5).  I'm also curious what the sans serif font is that's rendered
> >> in color and used for headers and such in the PDP-5 brochure.  To me,
> >> at least, it really evokes a sense of the period these flyers were
> >> designed in.
> > 
> > It is very likely not a typeface (a font is a package of cast metal type)
> > but a lettering design by an in-house artist at or hired by DEC.  That's
> > how corporate identities are done.  Or so my press-owning friends tell me.
> 
> I believe that discussion was had on here a few years ago (and reached the 
> same conclusion) - although my memory's not telling me whether it was about 
> the -5 or one of the later machines...
> 
> 
> 

For what its worth, my knowledge of computer font history

The Hershey fonts
This guy did these for the navy, and maps (correct me on this)
This was a deck we all had and were going hog wild with fortran plotting
originally for plotters or vector graphics, yet I recognize these fonts in software today for schematic capture as the exact same (Cadence Concept)

Knuth wrote an article or two in early Dr. Dobbs, about his METAFONT and how he added some randomization capability to make the fonts look more human.

His computer modern typeset is instantly recognizable in any academic textbook.

Anybody interested in computer typesetting needs a shelf of TeX, Latex, metafont books from Donald E. Knuth and Leslie Lamport

Randy

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