Font / Typeface AKICOLJ

[philmophlegm]

1. Does anyone know the name of the font that MS-DOS used?

2. When I was at infant school (1976 - 1979), lots of things like reading flash cards and name badges seemed to have the same sans serif typeface. Is this still used and what is / was it called?

Comments

[gwendally]

Around 1980 we called our new fancy typewriter font Sans Serif.

I think the old typewriter font was Times Roman.

I don't know about the MS DOS font. Probably something to do with pixels.

[parrot_knight]

The most common sans serif fonts were Helvetica and Univers. Do either of them look familiar?

I don't think a typewriter could cope with Times Roman. I can't find the names of mechanical typewriter fonts, only of digital fonts imitating them, alas.

[philmophlegm]

I don't think it was either Helvetica or Univers, because looking at those fonts, they both have lower case 'a' with a line at the top. The font I remember (I think) didn't have this, possibly because it was designed to look like the sort of lower case 'a' that children learning to write would use.

[parrot_knight]

That's a good point. I remember a font a little like Comic Sans in that it was designed to resemble handwriting.

[philmophlegm]

It was less cartoony, less wiggly that Comic Sans.

[ozisim]

Can't help you with the 70's typeface problem... My school used a hand-cranked lithograph to copy handwritten notes until the great lamington drive of 1988, which raised enough money to buy a photocopier and an apple IIb computer for the office.

But I'm pretty sure the MS DOS font was Courier. (Though our old MS DOS-based unix database shell used Terminal.)

[parrot_knight]

Terminal - I'm sure that's the one I remember seeing on university computers. I agree that Windows MS DOS windows on Windows seem to use Courier, though.

[philmophlegm]

Terminal seems to be the closest answer. Wikipedia says that it "is designed to approximate the font normally used in MS-DOS", without saying what the original font is. Maybe it doesn't actually have a name.

[sally_maria]

If you mean the font used on the command-line, it probably didn't have a name. I'm pretty sure it was whatever the operating system equivalent of hard-wired in - I don't remember any way to change it, and that's the kind of decorative tweaking I would have wanted to play with back in those days.