Characters as characters

I went looking for old fonts and found these instead.

Drawings recovered from early font, screen and terminal files.

How I found them

1A file called CRTURZ

In the MIT AI Lab’s font directory, I found a file called CRTURZ, dated 6 June 1975. Decoded, its seven characters are not letters. They are Snoopy twice, a dragon, a sun, a unicorn, a turtle and the Wumpus.

The seven characters of CRTURZ
CRTURZ, all seven characters, decoded from FONTS1; CRTURZ KST. File dated 6 June 1975. Explore in the collection

2Pictures filed under letters

A font stores a picture under each character code. Usually that picture is a letter. In CRTURZ, selecting C prints the dragon; a lower-case b prints the turtle.

Nothing in the files says why anyone made them this way. It wasn’t the only way to print a picture. Stanford’s manual for its XGP printer describes a mode for “virtually any drawing that can be expressed as a one-bit raster”, and vectors alongside text (§12.4).

Character A of CRTURZ
A
Character B of CRTURZ
B
Character C of CRTURZ
C
Character D of CRTURZ
D
Character a of CRTURZ
a
Character b of CRTURZ
b
Character c of CRTURZ
c
The seven characters with the codes they are filed under. Shown at one decoded bit per pixel. Explore in the collection

3The same drawings, elsewhere

The drawings turn up in other files. On the same MIT system, a directory of pictures for the NAME demon, files it “uses for picture displays”, says the read-me, holds a unicorn, a dragon, a turtle and Snoopy.

The dragon as a NAME demon picture

Picture file
CHANNA; NAMPIC DRAGON
5 Jun 1975, 09:35

The dragon as character C of CRTURZ

Font character C
FONTS1; CRTURZ KST
6 Jun 1975, 07:43

The same dragon stored two ways. Decoded, the picture has 2,147 black pixels and the character 2,146; all of the character’s pixels match, and the picture has one more (circled). The dates are when each file was last written, so they can’t say which came first. Explore the picture Explore the font

A copy of CRTURZ at Stanford, dated 18 July 1980, matches the MIT file bit for bit. A Xerox Dover font dictionary dated 15 June 1984 contains the same seven characters and one more, under the name CREATURES. The route between these versions isn’t recorded. An MIT message from 31 July 1981 does, however, record Dover fonts arriving from CMU, including a pictorial font called “creatures”.

The rest of the collection is here for the same reason: it surprised me.

4The fonts

I found the fonts too: about 1,100 of them, in the same archives. So far I have converted into files a modern computer can use.

This page is set in two of them, and , converted from Xerox PARC’s master drawings of its typefaces, in files dated 21 January 1982.