My college boyfriend had an original mac and an apple 27 pin printer (which meant it could print fonts with kerning and SERIFS). Printing out a standard college paper of around 12 pages at the higher resolution took around 45 minutes or so, and I am convinced that those serifs bumped my grades up at least one full grade. Very interesting walk down memory lane.
@cxa246 күн бұрын
I had some incredible software for Snow Leopard that I will probably never find again :(
@IkarusKommt6 күн бұрын
That font resource system was so patently stupid...
@marksimonson746 күн бұрын
Can you elaborate?
@IkarusKommt6 күн бұрын
@@marksimonson74 Hiding the font data inside a proprietary structure inside a hidden ressource file; hard-coding font IDs to some internal list; using that weird "size 0 is the family name" convention... I realize that they used the 16-bit 68k and had to deal with its 32k segments, so they probably tried to reuse their memory manager for the fonts too, but it is still inconvenient and overengineered.
@marksimonson746 күн бұрын
@@IkarusKommt Well, the original 128K Mac was very resource constrained, so they did a lot of things out of necessity that had to be revised later once the Mac had enough RAM. Within a year they added the FOND resource, which added more metadata besides the font name including kerning tables and font styles within families, and then replaced FONT with NFNT with System 6 (IIRC) which greatly expanded the number of font IDs possible, larger font sizes, and even color fonts. From the user's point of view, none of this stuff about font IDs mattered. It was only really an issue if you were someone who made fonts. The other thing to remember is that when the Mac was developed, no one was expecting that people would ever need more than a few fonts installed. PostScript fonts, the LaserWriter, and desktop publishing changed all that. Ultimately, the font manager and the classic Mac OS in general ran into scaling problems, which is why it didn't last. As a font developer, I don't miss having to deal with FONDs and NFNTs and resource forks, which were left behind (although still supported to some extent in the file system) with the transition to OSX.
@Mainyehc8 күн бұрын
Now I want one of these, too… What software did you demo? Fontographer? Edit: heh, asked too soon… Fontastic I didn’t really know, gotta check it out on my Basilisk II virtual machines, I guess. Also loving that LEGO case… They’re always a great alternative to 3D printing 🙃
@marksimonson748 күн бұрын
I also demoed Adobe Illustrator 1.0 and a little bit of SuperPaint and Acta, all of which I used in making my first fonts.
@HK_80811 күн бұрын
Nice im working on recapping my plus currently
@johnwelander14 күн бұрын
I liked the pace of the video; means I can keep up and enjoy the content, unlike most others. Thanks for your work.
@marksimonson7413 күн бұрын
Thanks!
@teamflashtv14 күн бұрын
Very enjoyable presentation.
@linuxuberuser14 күн бұрын
You should have gotten an SE30 but I had an Plus growing up it was my first computer
@marksimonson7414 күн бұрын
Can't argue with that. Probably the best of all the compact Macs.
@moeskido5 күн бұрын
I wanted an SE/30 very much in 1990, but all I could afford was the SE FDHD.
@ChopsticksDIYGarden15 күн бұрын
These days, there are plenty of excellent fonts available in the public domain. I have a hunch that AI will soon be able to assist in creating new fonts.
@ChopsticksDIYGarden15 күн бұрын
Mac has always been renowned for its sleek typography and overall design aesthetic from the early days onward.
@ChopsticksDIYGarden15 күн бұрын
In the late '80s to early '90s, I was in college and became interested in creating Vietnamese fonts. I did quite a bit of research at the time and experimented with PostScript and various font encodings.
@marksimonson7415 күн бұрын
That must have been tricky in the pre-Unicode days.
@ChopsticksDIYGarden15 күн бұрын
@@marksimonson74 Yes, it was tricky, especially since different groups tried to create their own encodings. We had VISCII, TCVN3, VIQR, VNI, and so on. Fortunately, UTF-8 gained popularity and is widely used today. The downside is that some people still use VNI fonts with UTF-8 encoding and wonder why the fonts don't look right. Hopefully, the VNI fonts will eventually go away as new fonts are likely to be UTF-8.
@alberthuman-being725716 күн бұрын
You Mentioned: Making FONTS (in Fontographer) on the Mac-Plus (was it 512 pixels across-the-top?) screen ... --> And I immediately-Remembered: How completely-TRANSFORMING was: Stepping-Out II !!! :-o ... Not-only could one Configure a Much Larger: Almost-SQUARE-dimension (Whatever pixel-dimensions would be JUST large-enough!) Screen-size for PageMaker, such that an ENTIRE: TWO-Page Layout would be READABLE! (Not "Greeked"?) ----> BUT, also in Fontographer You could ENLARGE a Font-Character: Large-Enough: To SEE the Outlines SMOOTHLY! :-) -- Of course the Mac-Plus PHYSICAL-Screen was still the SAME-size ... but as your-Mouse came to: the Screen-Edge: ... Stepping-Out-II would INSTANTLY-Scroll: to the REST of the Virtually-LARGER-Screen !!! :-o :-) BELIEVE me ... IF you can Install: Stepping-Out-II on Your Mac-Plus ... the Small-Screen will BE: VERY-Useable !!! -- As it works INSTANTLY ... as Contrasted with: VERY Painfully-SLOW: Screen Refreshes !!! ;-) :-)
@alberthuman-being725716 күн бұрын
I began using the one-internal + one external 3.5"-floppy-drive: 128K or 512K Mac in 1984-85 ... And a couple of years Later I had a Mac-Plus with the 3rd-Party: 32 MHz 68030 processor board + 4 MB RAM Put inside it! :-) (A SCSI External-Case with a 40MB Quantum HD was soooo Different to: just 2 Floppy Drives! :-o )
@alberthuman-being725716 күн бұрын
The original Apple Dot-Matrix printer was NOT much use! ... But, ONCE You GOT: A PostScript Laser-Printer ... the Sky was the Limit! :-o ..... MY first PostScript Laser-Printer was an (ugly)-NEC LED one, which was $3,000 with CHEAPER Consumables too... -- As the Apple LaserWriter was $5,000 !!! (And they were all: 300 DPI at-that-time! [Later NEXT had a "whopping": 400 DPI!]) I've Spent: 35 YEARS on-and-off: Being into: MAKING: PostScript Fonts (FontLab-8 has now Replaced Fontographer) ... -- But, It SEEMS that: PostScript Fonts are passe now ... with Social-Media & Cellphone-Videos ... Still: My present: M2 Pro Mac-Mini + Sony 43" 4K TV-Screen for My "Monitor" ... is the BEST: Font Work-Station that I have EVER HAD! ;-)
@marksimonson7415 күн бұрын
I remember Stepping Out. Pretty cool, but nothing beats a physically larger screen, which I already had by the time it existed. I only remember using it on a laptop.
@TheSulross16 күн бұрын
Plus is when the Mac finally became a viable computer - first job from university was programming the Mac Plus, used MPW Object Pascal, C, and Asm. Project used a trackball Mac as a kiosk console to operate a laser photo plotter for imagining printed circuit boards, as described in Gerber files, onto a sheet of film. The rasterization code ran on device embedded MC68K so could graphically preview the PCB on the Mac screen before committing to film. I personally owned a 128K Mac, which I did the soldering to upgrade to a 512K fat Mac - used Macbugs monitor and Lightspeed C for learning to program the Mac. So was very familiar with all three of these first Macs.
@marksimonson7416 күн бұрын
I don't think I mention it in the video (although I meant to), but I also owned an original 128K, upgraded to 512K (for $1000), upgraded again to add a third-party SCSI port ($250); and upgraded again to a Mac Plus (for another $1000-$4750 in all!). I replaced it with an actual Mac Plus when the price on those came down, selling the original to a friend. Some time later he told me that smoke started coming out of it. Not sure what became of it.
@TheSulross16 күн бұрын
Was a rather different era relative to now in this respect: The company I worked for in that first programming job sent myself and my boss to take a week long Mac programming course at Cupertino. The class consisted of all young guys like myself, except for my boss who was an older married guy. This training department at Apple was ran by a woman - older than myself given I was fresh out of college but definitely easy on the eyes; a lot of her assistants were younger women (probably all them single). So on a celebratory night after training they arranged to take the group out to a Benihana. My boss bowed out (he had the rental car) but this woman in charge said she’d come by and pick me up at my hotel. So she shows up in a convertible Mustang - instead of going straight to the event we went driving around the area with the top down. (Was some special treatment was not expecting - attractive lady, cool car…) We finally go on to the restaurant - where the food and drinks flowed, then this lady in charge had her female underlings pair up with us guys and get out on the dance floor. I don’t think Apple or any tech company conducts their product training programs like this any more. 😊
@marksimonson7416 күн бұрын
@@TheSulross That's pretty wild. Different era, for sure.
@sideburn18 күн бұрын
Did you do the diode mod to the plus so the scsi port powers the BlueSCSI? * oops I guess I shoulda waited til the end. Lol
@marksimonson7418 күн бұрын
Not yet
@marksimonson7413 күн бұрын
I did the mod today and it works beautifully. So nice to have one less thing to plug in. It was a little tricky removing the solder from the holes the diode goes into, but I managed.
@sideburn13 күн бұрын
@@marksimonson74 yeah I did mine too. Much better. You can even get it online with the bluescsi WiFi
@marciomaiajr18 күн бұрын
Fascinating video. It's amazing you were able to make such great bitmap fonts using these simple programs. Really enjoying your videos.
@365_Pussycat18 күн бұрын
3:05 You should use Lithium rechargable cell. They dont leak.
@marksimonson7418 күн бұрын
Unfortunately, it's an unusual type of battery (4.5V 523), only available in alkaline as far as I can tell. There only seems to be one manufacturer making them currently.
@365_Pussycat18 күн бұрын
You gotta make a video on all the books behind you
@marksimonson7418 күн бұрын
The obligatory wall of books about type, as seen in every photo of a type designer. 🙂 Could happen.
@thegoodkids-jackson278619 күн бұрын
Important work to share the history of digital type especially from someone who experienced it! Thanks so much!
@Regular-ls2yi21 күн бұрын
Thnk you so so mutchhhhh :)
@Apple2gs22 күн бұрын
Did you know the same year the Macintosh Plus was released, Apple introduced a vastly superior machine? It had 4,096 colors, a 640 horizontal pixel resolution, 32-voice wavetable synthesizer, a 16-bit CPU, built-in AppleTalk networking, the first appearance of the Apple Desktop Bus, 8 rear expansion ports and 8 internal expansion card slots, supported up to 8 megabytes RAM, full backwards compatibility with the classic Apple II line AND a Mac-like GUI with its own Toolbox...in *color*. A hybrid Apple II/Macintosh if you will. For some reason, Apple abandoned this revolutionary new computer and instead pushed the dull, boring and limited Macintosh. Back on the Macintosh Plus, I actually had 3 or 4 of them, but gave them away. Still have one Macintosh Plus motherboard, with the internal SCSI mod applied (and also an original Macintosh 128, upgraded internally to have most of the capabilities of the stock Plus, minus SCSI of course).
@marksimonson7421 күн бұрын
I remember at the time thinking it was impressive, but that it was too little too late for the Apple II line. It seems like Apple was hedging its bets, in case the Mac failed. It also felt like an effort to keep the Apple II revenue coming in, which was sustaining the company, until the Mac caught up.
@WinrichNaujoks20 күн бұрын
What do you mean they introduced it, when they actually abandoned it? Was this legendary computer every anything more than ideas on a piece of paper?
@TheSulross16 күн бұрын
The Mac could be viably programmed with a C compiler, which the software industry had largely shifted from writing in assembly language to high level language, and C was the predominate choice, which the MC68K CPU was extremely well geared for. The Intel x86 CPUs was also well geared for executing high level language compiled code generation. When the 6502 was enhanced to 16bit, they didn’t learn any lessons from other CPU designers as it still remained a piss poor CPU for compiled high level language development. Was a software developer then (still am) and saw this transition in the industry first hand. At that time a resume wasn’t seriously looked at if didn’t have C language programming experience. But beyond that, the Mac’s crisp B&W screen that had very good legibility for the day, was more useful to business and industry than the color graphics screen of a IIgs. My first job out of university was programming the Mac Plus for an industrial use in a hardware product. The factors just mentioned were all far more crucial than anything the IIgs had to offer that the Mac didn’t have.
@tub8r22 күн бұрын
Where's Papyrus?
@marksimonson7422 күн бұрын
Pre-Papyrus. But you could get it in Letraset transfer lettering.
@tub8r22 күн бұрын
Thank you for entertaining my semi-joking question. But Papyrus was released (incl. Letraset transfer sheets) around 85-87. And I was thinking one could've used those transfer sheets as facsimile for tracing fonts like you demoed. Of course before the major inclusion of Papyrus in MS Office font pack at the turn of the century nobody knew or cared about it. With this desktop publishing and type creation explosion like you've illustrated there were so many interesting options at the time.
@sideburn18 күн бұрын
Everywhere 😂
@eedle.bendhaardt11 күн бұрын
WHERE ARE THE TURTLESSSS!??
@jonotaylor501122 күн бұрын
100% important part of computing history!
@KamiruBTS23 күн бұрын
Chill video, looking forward! I like the the image quality! It's notoriously difficult to capture CRTs well
@marksimonson7423 күн бұрын
I used 60fps, but 30fps works well, too. Lots of flicker with 24fps. You also want to make sure the shutter speed is not faster than the refresh rate on the screen. I use a Sony A7 IV, which helps. I tried using the otherwise amazing camera on my iPhone 15 Pro, but shooting the Mac Plus screen looks like crap thanks to all the image processing it does to compensate for the tiny sensor and optics.
@KamiruBTS23 күн бұрын
@@marksimonson74 Thanks for the explanation! I'm guessing you can set shutter speed manually on something like an A7? It looked really neat!
@KamiruBTS23 күн бұрын
@@marksimonson74 Also, just seeing this now. This is just what I think - but I'd check if your CRT needs adjustment maybe? It seems quite narrow.
@marksimonson7423 күн бұрын
@@KamiruBTS It is possible, but it's generally at 1/60 of a second. Regarding the CRT, that's the best I've been able to get. It was too short vertically when I first got it, but that was pretty easy to fix using the adjustments inside the case.
@marksimonson7423 күн бұрын
@@KamiruBTS But you may be right that I made it too tall.
@sparkleglitch1327 күн бұрын
This was great Mark, thanks for sharing
@sideburn28 күн бұрын
Flying Toasters: 0:10
@marksimonson7428 күн бұрын
I wondered if anyone would notice. On hindsight, I should have used the Flying Toasters as a background on the title screen. It popped up on the projector screen before the talk and got a lot of comments and laughs from the attendees.
@sideburn28 күн бұрын
@@marksimonson74 haha can’t go wrong with giant flying toasters!
@sideburn28 күн бұрын
Also amazing you had those photos from the 80s
@rolandcrosby28 күн бұрын
wait a minute, the magazine blurb 10 minutes in was written by Marc Benioff?
@marksimonson7428 күн бұрын
That's weird. I never noticed. He would have been in college. Seems possible. FWIW, he's not listed as a regular contributing writer or editor in the magazine.
@fernandodiaz5303Ай бұрын
Wow, this is amazing! And I thought FontLab 5 was a nightmare :P
@locoluis1978Ай бұрын
The Atari 8-bit computers can display multiple character sets at a given time through the use of Display List Interrupts, though each character set takes 1 KB (128 8×8 glyphs), you can't change them mid-line, and the Atari 800 originally only had 8 KB of RAM (it was later expanded to 48 KB; later Atari 8-bit models had more RAM).
@marksimonson74Ай бұрын
Yeah, I'm well aware of that, but I didn't want to get off in the weeds, given the audience. Technically speaking, you _could_ do arbitrarily positioned bitmap text with different fonts, sizes and styles on other computers at the time in a particular program, but it wasn't the default state of the computer the way it was on the Mac. Later there were things like Windows and GEOS, of course. I remember there was a T: display driver for the Atari that did this to some extent, but at the cost of speed and memory.
@teleportkontrola2006Ай бұрын
This is gold, thanks Mark!
@qwe1231Ай бұрын
Memories. I had a Mac Plus with an acelerator card put in it (doubling the clock speed), but then I had to buy a Kensington Macsaver fan that slotted on top to keep it cool.
@marksimonson74Ай бұрын
I had a "fan hat" for mine at some point for the same reason. Not the most elegant look.
@qwe1231Ай бұрын
@@marksimonson74 When I later upgraded to a Duo 230 (with a DuoDock) I was chagrined to see that the processor in my NEC Silentwriter laser printer used the same chip as the Mac laptop, but with twice the clockspeed. I marvel at how I got real work done back then.
@marksimonson74Ай бұрын
@@qwe1231 I had a Duo 230 and DuoDock as well. 🙂
@QINGCHARLESАй бұрын
Think about this. Font Editor 2.0 is practically unusable. Imagine how bad Font Editor 1.0 was... 😭
@marksimonson74Ай бұрын
The fact that 1.0 was never released publicly is a clue. I'm still curious how they made the first fonts, since it doesn't seem possible to make a font from scratch with FE 2.0. Maybe they came from an earlier tool for making fonts for the Lisa. I should look into how fonts worked on that platform. I mean, QuickDraw came from the Lisa, and according to Andy Herzfeld the earlier fonts on the Mac (before they were FONT resources) were "QuickDraw fonts."
@QINGCHARLESАй бұрын
@@marksimonson74 Having made a lot of simple bitmap fonts in the 80s, I'm guessing they just did them all by hand the first time around? Just draw them on graph paper and then input all the rows one-by-one in hex, or draw them in a bitmap editor and have a little command-line convertor. I assume v1.0 is totally lost now? Do Apple have archives of this stuff that they release like Microsoft do?
@marksimonson74Ай бұрын
@@QINGCHARLES It's possible. I know a lot of early stuff was designed on graph paper, like the icons. I saw some of them at MOMA once. The FONT resource is partly a bitmap the height of the font with all the characters lined up in a row defining the width. You could do that on paper and work out the bytes to enter in a data structure.
@Whammy413Ай бұрын
Seeing ResEdit again made me smile.
@lukedornyАй бұрын
Fantastic. Also very happy that you’re here making videos, Mark. Heavy subscribe!!!
@marksimonson74Ай бұрын
Thanks, Luke! I've been meaning to do some videos here for a long time. More to come.
@TypographyGuruАй бұрын
Fascinating stuff! Thanks! I think I stick with Glyphs though. ;-)
@marksimonson74Ай бұрын
Me too. 🙂
@marksimonson742 ай бұрын
Apologies for the low volume on the sound. Still kind of new at this.
@tatsukimasu11 ай бұрын
Do these work also on Windows 98?
@marksimonson7411 ай бұрын
Not this specific model, which used Apple's proprietary ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) port. Wacom probably made an RS-232-based Windows version, though.
@baxtardboy11 ай бұрын
One of the best purchases I ever made for my 133mhz Pentium, back in 1996. Came with a copy of Fractal Design's 'Dabbler', a cut-down version of Painter (now owned by Corel) To this day I still prefer smaller tablets because my drawing style was remapped using this damn thing and I even ended up taking it to work where it helped me draw textures during my time working on GTA3. By the time we got round to Vice CIty all the artists were given Graphire tablets.
@marksimonson7411 ай бұрын
You worked on GTA? Cool. I have a friend who, that's like the only game he plays (as far as I know). But, yeah, it's a really nice tablet size. I actually owned its big brother, a 12x12 ArtZ II, back in the nineties, which was great. I got rid of it after Apple discontinued including ADB ports on Macs. But I recently acquired another one. It was a PC version, but I figured out a workaround to get it to work with vintage Macs (like the 180). I've been meaning to do a video about it.
@baxtardboy11 ай бұрын
@@marksimonson74 Aye me (and my artpad II) worked at a couple of games companies in Scotland before moving to Edinburgh to work on GTA from III up until GTA V. Just do videos on everything and build your channel all you can mate, everything you post is going to be of mega-interest to someone out there. Might be time to get a tripod for your camera too though :P
@marksimonson7411 ай бұрын
@@baxtardboy Tripod, yes. When I shot this, I did it on the spur of the moment, only vaguely thinking of putting it on KZread. Thanks for the encouragement. It would be fun to do more of these.
@tanvir.ahmed0 Жыл бұрын
This guy deserves better for this content😞
@marksimonson74 Жыл бұрын
Thanks for that. I'm not putting much time into this channel yet. Just trying things out to see what it's like in case I decide to put more effort into it.
@richardallan2331 Жыл бұрын
I just found my old one of these I got back in the late '90's for Photoshop 4 on my old Power Mac 7300. Unfortunately the toggle switch is missing. I don't think this was uncommon for that to break. I had a look on eBay & the only one that came with a pen at all was, like yours, brand new in the box. I have a Griffin iMate & I have connected it to my M1 Mac mini & it works. Just need to try to find some sort of driver now to get a few options...
@marksimonson74 Жыл бұрын
Wow, I hadn't tried that yet. I just connected it to my M1 MBP, and it works! Like you said, the Wacom control panel doesn't recognize it, though. Seems like it defaults to "mouse" mode, rather than the tablet being mapped to the screen. Crazy that it even works. I haven't tried it, but the app Connect My Tablet is available in the Mac app store and it purports to support older Wacom tablets. Not sure how far back though. apps.apple.com/us/app/connect-my-tablet/id1352696344?mt=12
@richardallan2331 Жыл бұрын
@@marksimonson74 Thanks for your reply. I'll have a look at that...
Пікірлер
My college boyfriend had an original mac and an apple 27 pin printer (which meant it could print fonts with kerning and SERIFS). Printing out a standard college paper of around 12 pages at the higher resolution took around 45 minutes or so, and I am convinced that those serifs bumped my grades up at least one full grade. Very interesting walk down memory lane.
I had some incredible software for Snow Leopard that I will probably never find again :(
That font resource system was so patently stupid...
Can you elaborate?
@@marksimonson74 Hiding the font data inside a proprietary structure inside a hidden ressource file; hard-coding font IDs to some internal list; using that weird "size 0 is the family name" convention... I realize that they used the 16-bit 68k and had to deal with its 32k segments, so they probably tried to reuse their memory manager for the fonts too, but it is still inconvenient and overengineered.
@@IkarusKommt Well, the original 128K Mac was very resource constrained, so they did a lot of things out of necessity that had to be revised later once the Mac had enough RAM. Within a year they added the FOND resource, which added more metadata besides the font name including kerning tables and font styles within families, and then replaced FONT with NFNT with System 6 (IIRC) which greatly expanded the number of font IDs possible, larger font sizes, and even color fonts. From the user's point of view, none of this stuff about font IDs mattered. It was only really an issue if you were someone who made fonts. The other thing to remember is that when the Mac was developed, no one was expecting that people would ever need more than a few fonts installed. PostScript fonts, the LaserWriter, and desktop publishing changed all that. Ultimately, the font manager and the classic Mac OS in general ran into scaling problems, which is why it didn't last. As a font developer, I don't miss having to deal with FONDs and NFNTs and resource forks, which were left behind (although still supported to some extent in the file system) with the transition to OSX.
Now I want one of these, too… What software did you demo? Fontographer? Edit: heh, asked too soon… Fontastic I didn’t really know, gotta check it out on my Basilisk II virtual machines, I guess. Also loving that LEGO case… They’re always a great alternative to 3D printing 🙃
I also demoed Adobe Illustrator 1.0 and a little bit of SuperPaint and Acta, all of which I used in making my first fonts.
Nice im working on recapping my plus currently
I liked the pace of the video; means I can keep up and enjoy the content, unlike most others. Thanks for your work.
Thanks!
Very enjoyable presentation.
You should have gotten an SE30 but I had an Plus growing up it was my first computer
Can't argue with that. Probably the best of all the compact Macs.
I wanted an SE/30 very much in 1990, but all I could afford was the SE FDHD.
These days, there are plenty of excellent fonts available in the public domain. I have a hunch that AI will soon be able to assist in creating new fonts.
Mac has always been renowned for its sleek typography and overall design aesthetic from the early days onward.
In the late '80s to early '90s, I was in college and became interested in creating Vietnamese fonts. I did quite a bit of research at the time and experimented with PostScript and various font encodings.
That must have been tricky in the pre-Unicode days.
@@marksimonson74 Yes, it was tricky, especially since different groups tried to create their own encodings. We had VISCII, TCVN3, VIQR, VNI, and so on. Fortunately, UTF-8 gained popularity and is widely used today. The downside is that some people still use VNI fonts with UTF-8 encoding and wonder why the fonts don't look right. Hopefully, the VNI fonts will eventually go away as new fonts are likely to be UTF-8.
You Mentioned: Making FONTS (in Fontographer) on the Mac-Plus (was it 512 pixels across-the-top?) screen ... --> And I immediately-Remembered: How completely-TRANSFORMING was: Stepping-Out II !!! :-o ... Not-only could one Configure a Much Larger: Almost-SQUARE-dimension (Whatever pixel-dimensions would be JUST large-enough!) Screen-size for PageMaker, such that an ENTIRE: TWO-Page Layout would be READABLE! (Not "Greeked"?) ----> BUT, also in Fontographer You could ENLARGE a Font-Character: Large-Enough: To SEE the Outlines SMOOTHLY! :-) -- Of course the Mac-Plus PHYSICAL-Screen was still the SAME-size ... but as your-Mouse came to: the Screen-Edge: ... Stepping-Out-II would INSTANTLY-Scroll: to the REST of the Virtually-LARGER-Screen !!! :-o :-) BELIEVE me ... IF you can Install: Stepping-Out-II on Your Mac-Plus ... the Small-Screen will BE: VERY-Useable !!! -- As it works INSTANTLY ... as Contrasted with: VERY Painfully-SLOW: Screen Refreshes !!! ;-) :-)
I began using the one-internal + one external 3.5"-floppy-drive: 128K or 512K Mac in 1984-85 ... And a couple of years Later I had a Mac-Plus with the 3rd-Party: 32 MHz 68030 processor board + 4 MB RAM Put inside it! :-) (A SCSI External-Case with a 40MB Quantum HD was soooo Different to: just 2 Floppy Drives! :-o )
The original Apple Dot-Matrix printer was NOT much use! ... But, ONCE You GOT: A PostScript Laser-Printer ... the Sky was the Limit! :-o ..... MY first PostScript Laser-Printer was an (ugly)-NEC LED one, which was $3,000 with CHEAPER Consumables too... -- As the Apple LaserWriter was $5,000 !!! (And they were all: 300 DPI at-that-time! [Later NEXT had a "whopping": 400 DPI!]) I've Spent: 35 YEARS on-and-off: Being into: MAKING: PostScript Fonts (FontLab-8 has now Replaced Fontographer) ... -- But, It SEEMS that: PostScript Fonts are passe now ... with Social-Media & Cellphone-Videos ... Still: My present: M2 Pro Mac-Mini + Sony 43" 4K TV-Screen for My "Monitor" ... is the BEST: Font Work-Station that I have EVER HAD! ;-)
I remember Stepping Out. Pretty cool, but nothing beats a physically larger screen, which I already had by the time it existed. I only remember using it on a laptop.
Plus is when the Mac finally became a viable computer - first job from university was programming the Mac Plus, used MPW Object Pascal, C, and Asm. Project used a trackball Mac as a kiosk console to operate a laser photo plotter for imagining printed circuit boards, as described in Gerber files, onto a sheet of film. The rasterization code ran on device embedded MC68K so could graphically preview the PCB on the Mac screen before committing to film. I personally owned a 128K Mac, which I did the soldering to upgrade to a 512K fat Mac - used Macbugs monitor and Lightspeed C for learning to program the Mac. So was very familiar with all three of these first Macs.
I don't think I mention it in the video (although I meant to), but I also owned an original 128K, upgraded to 512K (for $1000), upgraded again to add a third-party SCSI port ($250); and upgraded again to a Mac Plus (for another $1000-$4750 in all!). I replaced it with an actual Mac Plus when the price on those came down, selling the original to a friend. Some time later he told me that smoke started coming out of it. Not sure what became of it.
Was a rather different era relative to now in this respect: The company I worked for in that first programming job sent myself and my boss to take a week long Mac programming course at Cupertino. The class consisted of all young guys like myself, except for my boss who was an older married guy. This training department at Apple was ran by a woman - older than myself given I was fresh out of college but definitely easy on the eyes; a lot of her assistants were younger women (probably all them single). So on a celebratory night after training they arranged to take the group out to a Benihana. My boss bowed out (he had the rental car) but this woman in charge said she’d come by and pick me up at my hotel. So she shows up in a convertible Mustang - instead of going straight to the event we went driving around the area with the top down. (Was some special treatment was not expecting - attractive lady, cool car…) We finally go on to the restaurant - where the food and drinks flowed, then this lady in charge had her female underlings pair up with us guys and get out on the dance floor. I don’t think Apple or any tech company conducts their product training programs like this any more. 😊
@@TheSulross That's pretty wild. Different era, for sure.
Did you do the diode mod to the plus so the scsi port powers the BlueSCSI? * oops I guess I shoulda waited til the end. Lol
Not yet
I did the mod today and it works beautifully. So nice to have one less thing to plug in. It was a little tricky removing the solder from the holes the diode goes into, but I managed.
@@marksimonson74 yeah I did mine too. Much better. You can even get it online with the bluescsi WiFi
Fascinating video. It's amazing you were able to make such great bitmap fonts using these simple programs. Really enjoying your videos.
3:05 You should use Lithium rechargable cell. They dont leak.
Unfortunately, it's an unusual type of battery (4.5V 523), only available in alkaline as far as I can tell. There only seems to be one manufacturer making them currently.
You gotta make a video on all the books behind you
The obligatory wall of books about type, as seen in every photo of a type designer. 🙂 Could happen.
Important work to share the history of digital type especially from someone who experienced it! Thanks so much!
Thnk you so so mutchhhhh :)
Did you know the same year the Macintosh Plus was released, Apple introduced a vastly superior machine? It had 4,096 colors, a 640 horizontal pixel resolution, 32-voice wavetable synthesizer, a 16-bit CPU, built-in AppleTalk networking, the first appearance of the Apple Desktop Bus, 8 rear expansion ports and 8 internal expansion card slots, supported up to 8 megabytes RAM, full backwards compatibility with the classic Apple II line AND a Mac-like GUI with its own Toolbox...in *color*. A hybrid Apple II/Macintosh if you will. For some reason, Apple abandoned this revolutionary new computer and instead pushed the dull, boring and limited Macintosh. Back on the Macintosh Plus, I actually had 3 or 4 of them, but gave them away. Still have one Macintosh Plus motherboard, with the internal SCSI mod applied (and also an original Macintosh 128, upgraded internally to have most of the capabilities of the stock Plus, minus SCSI of course).
I remember at the time thinking it was impressive, but that it was too little too late for the Apple II line. It seems like Apple was hedging its bets, in case the Mac failed. It also felt like an effort to keep the Apple II revenue coming in, which was sustaining the company, until the Mac caught up.
What do you mean they introduced it, when they actually abandoned it? Was this legendary computer every anything more than ideas on a piece of paper?
The Mac could be viably programmed with a C compiler, which the software industry had largely shifted from writing in assembly language to high level language, and C was the predominate choice, which the MC68K CPU was extremely well geared for. The Intel x86 CPUs was also well geared for executing high level language compiled code generation. When the 6502 was enhanced to 16bit, they didn’t learn any lessons from other CPU designers as it still remained a piss poor CPU for compiled high level language development. Was a software developer then (still am) and saw this transition in the industry first hand. At that time a resume wasn’t seriously looked at if didn’t have C language programming experience. But beyond that, the Mac’s crisp B&W screen that had very good legibility for the day, was more useful to business and industry than the color graphics screen of a IIgs. My first job out of university was programming the Mac Plus for an industrial use in a hardware product. The factors just mentioned were all far more crucial than anything the IIgs had to offer that the Mac didn’t have.
Where's Papyrus?
Pre-Papyrus. But you could get it in Letraset transfer lettering.
Thank you for entertaining my semi-joking question. But Papyrus was released (incl. Letraset transfer sheets) around 85-87. And I was thinking one could've used those transfer sheets as facsimile for tracing fonts like you demoed. Of course before the major inclusion of Papyrus in MS Office font pack at the turn of the century nobody knew or cared about it. With this desktop publishing and type creation explosion like you've illustrated there were so many interesting options at the time.
Everywhere 😂
WHERE ARE THE TURTLESSSS!??
100% important part of computing history!
Chill video, looking forward! I like the the image quality! It's notoriously difficult to capture CRTs well
I used 60fps, but 30fps works well, too. Lots of flicker with 24fps. You also want to make sure the shutter speed is not faster than the refresh rate on the screen. I use a Sony A7 IV, which helps. I tried using the otherwise amazing camera on my iPhone 15 Pro, but shooting the Mac Plus screen looks like crap thanks to all the image processing it does to compensate for the tiny sensor and optics.
@@marksimonson74 Thanks for the explanation! I'm guessing you can set shutter speed manually on something like an A7? It looked really neat!
@@marksimonson74 Also, just seeing this now. This is just what I think - but I'd check if your CRT needs adjustment maybe? It seems quite narrow.
@@KamiruBTS It is possible, but it's generally at 1/60 of a second. Regarding the CRT, that's the best I've been able to get. It was too short vertically when I first got it, but that was pretty easy to fix using the adjustments inside the case.
@@KamiruBTS But you may be right that I made it too tall.
This was great Mark, thanks for sharing
Flying Toasters: 0:10
I wondered if anyone would notice. On hindsight, I should have used the Flying Toasters as a background on the title screen. It popped up on the projector screen before the talk and got a lot of comments and laughs from the attendees.
@@marksimonson74 haha can’t go wrong with giant flying toasters!
Also amazing you had those photos from the 80s
wait a minute, the magazine blurb 10 minutes in was written by Marc Benioff?
That's weird. I never noticed. He would have been in college. Seems possible. FWIW, he's not listed as a regular contributing writer or editor in the magazine.
Wow, this is amazing! And I thought FontLab 5 was a nightmare :P
The Atari 8-bit computers can display multiple character sets at a given time through the use of Display List Interrupts, though each character set takes 1 KB (128 8×8 glyphs), you can't change them mid-line, and the Atari 800 originally only had 8 KB of RAM (it was later expanded to 48 KB; later Atari 8-bit models had more RAM).
Yeah, I'm well aware of that, but I didn't want to get off in the weeds, given the audience. Technically speaking, you _could_ do arbitrarily positioned bitmap text with different fonts, sizes and styles on other computers at the time in a particular program, but it wasn't the default state of the computer the way it was on the Mac. Later there were things like Windows and GEOS, of course. I remember there was a T: display driver for the Atari that did this to some extent, but at the cost of speed and memory.
This is gold, thanks Mark!
Memories. I had a Mac Plus with an acelerator card put in it (doubling the clock speed), but then I had to buy a Kensington Macsaver fan that slotted on top to keep it cool.
I had a "fan hat" for mine at some point for the same reason. Not the most elegant look.
@@marksimonson74 When I later upgraded to a Duo 230 (with a DuoDock) I was chagrined to see that the processor in my NEC Silentwriter laser printer used the same chip as the Mac laptop, but with twice the clockspeed. I marvel at how I got real work done back then.
@@qwe1231 I had a Duo 230 and DuoDock as well. 🙂
Think about this. Font Editor 2.0 is practically unusable. Imagine how bad Font Editor 1.0 was... 😭
The fact that 1.0 was never released publicly is a clue. I'm still curious how they made the first fonts, since it doesn't seem possible to make a font from scratch with FE 2.0. Maybe they came from an earlier tool for making fonts for the Lisa. I should look into how fonts worked on that platform. I mean, QuickDraw came from the Lisa, and according to Andy Herzfeld the earlier fonts on the Mac (before they were FONT resources) were "QuickDraw fonts."
@@marksimonson74 Having made a lot of simple bitmap fonts in the 80s, I'm guessing they just did them all by hand the first time around? Just draw them on graph paper and then input all the rows one-by-one in hex, or draw them in a bitmap editor and have a little command-line convertor. I assume v1.0 is totally lost now? Do Apple have archives of this stuff that they release like Microsoft do?
@@QINGCHARLES It's possible. I know a lot of early stuff was designed on graph paper, like the icons. I saw some of them at MOMA once. The FONT resource is partly a bitmap the height of the font with all the characters lined up in a row defining the width. You could do that on paper and work out the bytes to enter in a data structure.
Seeing ResEdit again made me smile.
Fantastic. Also very happy that you’re here making videos, Mark. Heavy subscribe!!!
Thanks, Luke! I've been meaning to do some videos here for a long time. More to come.
Fascinating stuff! Thanks! I think I stick with Glyphs though. ;-)
Me too. 🙂
Apologies for the low volume on the sound. Still kind of new at this.
Do these work also on Windows 98?
Not this specific model, which used Apple's proprietary ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) port. Wacom probably made an RS-232-based Windows version, though.
One of the best purchases I ever made for my 133mhz Pentium, back in 1996. Came with a copy of Fractal Design's 'Dabbler', a cut-down version of Painter (now owned by Corel) To this day I still prefer smaller tablets because my drawing style was remapped using this damn thing and I even ended up taking it to work where it helped me draw textures during my time working on GTA3. By the time we got round to Vice CIty all the artists were given Graphire tablets.
You worked on GTA? Cool. I have a friend who, that's like the only game he plays (as far as I know). But, yeah, it's a really nice tablet size. I actually owned its big brother, a 12x12 ArtZ II, back in the nineties, which was great. I got rid of it after Apple discontinued including ADB ports on Macs. But I recently acquired another one. It was a PC version, but I figured out a workaround to get it to work with vintage Macs (like the 180). I've been meaning to do a video about it.
@@marksimonson74 Aye me (and my artpad II) worked at a couple of games companies in Scotland before moving to Edinburgh to work on GTA from III up until GTA V. Just do videos on everything and build your channel all you can mate, everything you post is going to be of mega-interest to someone out there. Might be time to get a tripod for your camera too though :P
@@baxtardboy Tripod, yes. When I shot this, I did it on the spur of the moment, only vaguely thinking of putting it on KZread. Thanks for the encouragement. It would be fun to do more of these.
This guy deserves better for this content😞
Thanks for that. I'm not putting much time into this channel yet. Just trying things out to see what it's like in case I decide to put more effort into it.
I just found my old one of these I got back in the late '90's for Photoshop 4 on my old Power Mac 7300. Unfortunately the toggle switch is missing. I don't think this was uncommon for that to break. I had a look on eBay & the only one that came with a pen at all was, like yours, brand new in the box. I have a Griffin iMate & I have connected it to my M1 Mac mini & it works. Just need to try to find some sort of driver now to get a few options...
Wow, I hadn't tried that yet. I just connected it to my M1 MBP, and it works! Like you said, the Wacom control panel doesn't recognize it, though. Seems like it defaults to "mouse" mode, rather than the tablet being mapped to the screen. Crazy that it even works. I haven't tried it, but the app Connect My Tablet is available in the Mac app store and it purports to support older Wacom tablets. Not sure how far back though. apps.apple.com/us/app/connect-my-tablet/id1352696344?mt=12
@@marksimonson74 Thanks for your reply. I'll have a look at that...