Fonts Before Mac (1983)

slomacuser

Tinkerer
Nov 1, 2021
129
101
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I came a cross discs image that was probally used by Susan Kare in 1983. The disc was labeled Susan's Fonts, mac Format Font 4.30.83. On the Sleeve there are writings elefont, fat font, patti.

The disc image was not bootable on Twiggy Mac Emulator, actually it even does not include a Finder or System file, but files like SYSTEM.RSRC, SHELL.OBJ and MACSYS.CODE.

IMG_0803.png


On the discs was also font editor file which I assume it is the very first version of Font Editor [ 1 ] for Macintosh and some files named CREAM12, ELEFONT, FATFONT, MIXEDCAPS, OLDENGLISH18, Patti, pingpong12, city lite 12, city fat 12.

ELEFONT was the name for CHICAGO Macintosh System Font. [ 2 ]

And this was the first file I tried to open. I learned about how to use Font Editor 2.0 thanks to @Mark Simonson's excellent guide.

So for the first time ever let me publicly present you the ELEFONT type here :) (Well I allready posted this on 68kMlA so this is the second time)

ELEFONT.GIF

Lets compare it to CHICAGO font:

CHICAGO.GIF

I could happily open this early font files with Font Editor 2.0 which what we have to say was probably just converted from Twiggy Mac resources to the final Mac 128k resources and added #2.0, no serious updates were possibly made because it really behaves and looks like a proto product I mean other Mac Twiggy applications.

Ok, back to fonts. There are some other variants of ELEFONT like FATFONT:

FATFONT.GIF


Screen Shot 2025-07-10 at 7.02.19 PM.png


The others fonts are CITY FONT FAT and CITY FONT LITE:

citiy fat.GIF

citi lite.GIF

MIXEDCAPS font:

MIXEDCAPS.GIF


I have opend this fonts with FontEditor and installed them into suitcase called Susan Fonts. I added ID's to them from 30 to 34. If you red Marks guide you know that fonts from 0-127 were reserved for Apple.

Because the final release fonts came with this ID's:

FONT ID.GIF

+ two special fonts that came with game Alice

Alice Cartoon.GIF

And on the Twiggy Macs there were this fonts available:

twiggy id.GIF

Most of this fonts were built into MacSketch and later into MacPaint.

The initial implementation of the font manager simply included a few built-in fonts that were linked with the system, and it returned the system font if you requested one that wasn't built-in. The initial system font that we used through most of 1981 was one that we borrowed from Smalltalk called "Cream". [ 3 ]

I looked for Cream font on the internet and came across this link [ 4 ]

So Apple didn't borrow just CREAM font but also these fonts: ELITE, GACHA, HELVETICA, OLDENGLISH, TIMESROMAN.

Here you can compare OLDENGLISH and LONDON font:

lONDON-oLDeNGLISH.GIF

Ok, so back to ELEFONT. Before ELEFONT became CHICAGO it was called SYSTEM FONT (From top to bottom ELEFONT, SYSTEM, CHICAGO):

System Font.GIF

And at the end what I found on that Susan's discs is beautiful BootScreen whic writes Macintosh across the black screen in its own special type :)

macintosh.jpg


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[ 1 ] https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/font-editor-20
[ 2 ] https://folklore.org/World_Class_Cities.html
[ 3 ] https://folklore.org/Font_Manager.html
[ 4 ] https://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/Indigo/AltoFonts/.index.html
 

slomacuser

Tinkerer
Nov 1, 2021
129
101
43
I will write about it later. There were hundreds of twiggy discs imaged for museum in California and some leaked out.. after 10 years nobody did with them anything for public so I decided to bring this out … I think community deserves it, its a history and we like to learn from it :)