The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack

119 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by OuterVale

16 Comments

rob74

8 hours ago

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.

londons_explore

5 hours ago

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.

AnthonBerg

7 hours ago

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?

m463

10 hours ago

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!)

user

11 hours ago

[deleted]

romwell

9 hours ago

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.

486sx33

8 hours ago

Used to just use EDIT or ACIDDRAW

jesprenj

10 hours ago

> 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.

akx

10 hours ago

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

teddyh

8 hours ago

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.

akx

3 hours ago

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...

user

4 hours ago

[deleted]