26 Feb
2009
26 Feb
'09
11:24 a.m.
From: Ethan Dicks
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 9:56 PM
On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Jason Fitzpatrick
<jason at havnet.net>> wrote:
> Hi All,
> Just a quick note to let you know that we have
finally started creating
> PDF's of some of our older computing brochures.
> There's some on the PDP-5, PDP-6 & PDP-7
which you might find interesting
> ...
Very nice.
Are there any font historians in the audience? I'm
curious what the
serif font is that DEC used back then (both on the "Digital Equipment
Corp" logo on the PDP-5, for example, and in the brochure for the
PDP-5). I'm also curious what the sans serif font is that's rendered
in color and used for headers and such in the PDP-5 brochure. To me,
at least, it really evokes a sense of the period these flyers were
designed in.
It is very likely not a typeface (a font is a package of cast metal type)
but a lettering design by an in-house artist at or hired by DEC. That's
how corporate identities are done. Or so my press-owning friends tell me.
Note that DEC changed from a design with serifs to a sans-serif between
in 1965--and the change was completed between the preliminary and final
versions of the PDP-7 Handbook (F-77), as can be seen at Bitsavers.
Rich