The C64 Dead Test Font

14 hours ago (masswerk.at)

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...

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

Nice exploration, bit of quirky fun.

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

    • 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. :-)

  • 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.)

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).

  • There are a hundred variants of it used in various software for the C64, the Amiga, the anything.