Hershey Fonts now 50 years old

[Paul Koning]

> On May 11, 2017, at 10:37 AM, Al Kossow via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> Max Mathews produced a set of three fonts at Bell Labs in 1967 as well.
> "Three Fonts of Computer-drawn Letters"
> The Journal of Typographic Research pp 345-356
> 
> https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/visiblelanguage/pdf/V1N4_1967_E.pdf
> 
> which we have in the collection
> http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102675897
> 
> I read the cards about a month ago, I'll check when the data is going to be made available
> 
> On 5/11/17 3:53 AM, Shoppa, Tim via cctalk wrote:
>> I grew up with X-Y scope displays, their associated electrostatic printers, and Calcomp pen plotters. To draw letters and symbols on these, we used Fortran libraries driven by data tables to make "Hershey Characters".

Computer drawn characters are older than that; a good example of vector drawn characters is the CDC 6600 console, from around 1964.  Or the plotter library documented in report MR 73 from the Mathematical Center in Amsterdam, April 1965.  Both are simpler letter shapes than in Hershey's document.

	paul