The C64 Dead Test Font

110 points by masswerk 14 hours ago on hackernews | 19 comments

In Germany (maybe also Austria?), that font is probably best known from the logo of major computer magazine/site CHIP (https://www.chip.de/). Although, for some unfathomable reason, the C in the "dead test font" doesn't have the characteristic "thickening" in the lower vertical part, although the G has it...

daneel_w | 7 hours ago

And so many variant typefaces of the same graphical language were seen in a million products during the home computer boom of the late 70s and early 80s. Iconic.

: kevin_thibedeau | 2 hours ago
It's a copy of the Westminster font from the 60s which was an adaption of the visual style of MICR digits and symbols to a full symbology (without being machine readable). It was a meme for computerbilia of the era that now seems quaint.

scotty79 | 4 hours ago

The other thing that caught my eye is that M has the thickening on the opposite side to N. I thought it was for easier recognition of similar letters (same with A and R, O and Q), but U and V have the thickening on the same side. Maybe C vs G is the reason why C doesn't have the thickening.

ikari_pl | an hour ago

This is basically the MICR font: Magnetic Ink (!) Character Recognition. Amazing idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...

krige | 11 hours ago

Good ol' It's A Computer (tm) font. A good while back I've been using Westminster in every piece of UI I wrote for myself. Maybe I should start doing that again.

: jansan | 5 hours ago
Here is an interesting first hand account about the history of Westminster. Interestingly the creator himself does not seem to know why the (IMO rather unfitting) name Westminster was chosen:
https://www.mercerdesign.com/true-story-westminster-font/

Chaosvex | 10 hours ago

Seeing typos like 'resulation' is now a nice hint that a human wrote the article.

Nice exploration, bit of quirky fun.

phrotoma | 8 hours ago

> Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of wherever.

: [OP] masswerk | 6 hours ago
Every hand-knotted carpet has some error per design, since only Allah is perfect.
But, I guess, "resulation" may be a bit blotchy for a sign of humbleness. :-)

[OP] masswerk | 6 hours ago

Sorry, I had to fix this.

(You're welcome anyway. And yes, I think, it's the sort of quirky article, an LLM can't come up with.)

benj111 | 4 hours ago

Don't say that, or else Ai will start inserting typos.

: Chaosvex | 3 hours ago
Oh, I'm sure there are people that already do it intentionally.

ikari_pl | 3 hours ago

As a perfectionist, I twitched ;-)

bitwize | 9 hours ago

I love the "MICR line"-like appearance, fonts of which type were heavily used in the 1970s and 1980s to indicate "computer/technology stuff".

jansan | 5 hours ago

I am pretty sure that I saw that font on a C64 before. Paradroid used a very similar font for the logo, but the game itself uses a different font (Paradrew).

: daneel_w | 4 hours ago
There are a hundred variants of it used in various software for the C64, the Amiga, the anything.

cousin_it | 4 hours ago

Reminds me of the font in Master of Orion: https://www.mobygames.com/game/212/master-of-orion/screensho...

hankbond | 9 minutes ago

I was recently exploring fonts of the next decade from old Mac system 6-9 era on my still in progress personal blog site https://hankdoes.ai/design-system/

Thank you author for the font and the lovely dive into computing and type history!