Who else loves this font (that was never actually displayed on any screen back then?)
Posted by Powerful_Wizard71@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 143 comments
Who else loves this font (that was never actually displayed on any screen back then?)
I’ve always wondered why in the world the MICR font became the universal symbol for computers in the '80s, especially since no computer at the time actually utilized it to display anything. While I was busy using blocky pixels on an ZX-Spectrum, this specialized typeface was appearing on every "high-tech" movie poster and toy gadget imaginable.
The association was actually a bit of a creative hangover. The font was originally engineered in the 1950s for massive banking mainframes to read magnetic ink on checks. Because those were the first "electronic brains" the public ever encountered, the design world adopted that specific look as a visual shorthand for computing. By the 1980s, the font had become a cultural trope; even though home computers had moved on to entirely different display technologies, designers kept using those 1950s banking numerals to signal went that something was meant to be "digital"
hatsnatcher23@reddit
The Batman Beyond Batcave computer did
takingastep@reddit
I mainly recall seeing it in a couple of contexts:
> on paper checks, usually for bank routing numbers and account numbers;
> in old sci-fi video games, specifically Star Raiders for the Atari 400/800, and the “Tron” and “Discs of Tron” arcade games; I’d imagine there are more, but those are the ones I can recall easily.
ChuckMarty732@reddit
lol that is true, I never thought of that.
takeyouraxeandhack@reddit
You omitted the funny bit: they are shaped this way to make sure that every character has a different amount of magnetic ink, so the reader can tell them apart without using optical devices.
I love this typography. It's a symbol of ingenuity.
iissmarter@reddit
The O and D appear to have the same amount in this image. Was it originally only designed for numerals?
fosf0r@reddit
Yes. Here are the ONLY characters that were used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition#/media/File:MICR_char.svg
Ardnabrak@reddit
Still in use on bank checks today. At least in the USA
thomas_han1971@reddit
TIL that North Americans still use cheques...!
miner_cooling_trials@reddit
Hong Kong still actively use cheques
bigbigdummie@reddit
Because checks buy you float time, a day or two at least.
miner_cooling_trials@reddit
With ATM cheque deposit/digital scanning, money is in your account next day
bigbigdummie@reddit
Those days are over, I guess. I still say, check kiting is an art! :)
miner_cooling_trials@reddit
You are not wrong!
TorTheMentor@reddit
Barely. There are a few services that still require it, but in many cases we'll actually write an e-check, which is just providing an ABA routing number and account number for a recurring draft by ACH (automated clearing house).
Halen_@reddit
You would be surprised how high paper check volume still is
corporaterebel@reddit
Yes, I have some old software and check blanks from the 1990's. Somebody wanted a check sent to them, so I fired up the software and printed out a check.
Somebody at the bank processing center figured out it wasn't true MICR. Affixed/glued a small strip of paper on the bottom of my laser printed check with the same routing number and all that in with MICR.
I smirked, but they did honor the check without issue.
new2bay@reddit
Of course they honored it. A check is a legal document with very few specific requirements. You don’t have to even use any specific typeface for the account numbers.
Wh1skeyTF@reddit
I had my bank issue me some temporary checks once because I needed only a couple. They were printed on regular old white paper with no embellishments and looked so odd and fake. I hesitated to even use them for fear they wouldn’t be accepted.
corporaterebel@reddit
Yes, I am familiar with how checks work.
Because it was fun, I went so far as to make it appear exactly like a MICR check. I was assuming they would do some sort of OCR as a backup, but no....it was a manual intervention. Probably one of many that day and they just shake their head.
I figured they would call me or otherwise complain that I was trying to "fool" ...but, no, they just fixed it and moved on.
Breitsol_Victor@reddit
Having seen part of a clearing house, they do/did have optical processing. Including scans with special lighting.
Halen_@reddit
Only use OCR to get the data though, they just scan the entire item and the digital image becomes the legal check
V8-6-4@reddit
Maybe because rest of the world doesn’t use checks anymore.
shinyviper@reddit
Yup, I have a client that prints many things, including checks. They use MICR toner for those jobs. Fun fact: you can print the entire document with MICR toner (its cost per-page is not much above regular toner) and it looks the exact same, but the check numbers work like magic!
PhotoJim99@reddit
Used on Canadian cheques too.
revdon@reddit
MICR!
slabua@reddit
O and D are different, not mirrored.
derekcz@reddit
if it scanned from side to side then each letter would produce a different signature?
joshu@reddit
this isn't the real font. E13B was only numbers, i think.
Powerful_Wizard71@reddit (OP)
Exactly. I just found a similar font.
Hurricane_32@reddit
What's the name of this font you used? I'm actually looking to use it in a project :)
ThickAsABrickJT@reddit
It's because this is an imitation of OCR A, which was designed to be magnetically readable.
OCR A has significantly different glyphs for 0, O, and D.
lagerforlunch@reddit
Had to design checks once, to be produced by our ERP system. Getting the MICR line right nearly cost me my sanity.
Powerful_Wizard71@reddit (OP)
Exactly. No complicated OCR was needed.
chrisgreer@reddit
There is a business right down from my house that still has a sign like this out front.
CooperDK@reddit
Not me. At all.
dizzywig2000@reddit
It might be different, but I swear I’ve seen this font used on cheques in the US
bassmedic@reddit
It’s the old OCR/MICR font used in early character recognition.
SirTwitchALot@reddit
MICR became common in the mid to late 1950s. For many, it was the first computer related thing they had ever seen. Suddenly, checks had these funky numbers on them. For them, funky characters=computer.
Miserable_Signature3@reddit
Micr was developed in 1958. It couldn't have become common in the mid-50s.
SirTwitchALot@reddit
It was adopted as a standard in 1958 and first demonstrated in 1956
idiot206@reddit
Did MICR predate barcodes, or was it an efficient way to combine machine and human readable data?
revdon@reddit
MICR 1957
UPC 1973ish
Vectrex452@reddit
The Tandy 400 used that font.
King_Corduroy@reddit
Doom and gloom while things go boom!
NightmareJoker2@reddit
Engineered to be printed and machine readable, either by a hall effect sensor through use of magnetic ink or optical recognition, even when the resolution was so poor, that you were only left with different shades of grey…
Jorpho@reddit
Worth emphasizing that, as per the article, "None of the alphanumeric 'computer' typefaces like Westminster could be read magnetically."
chandris@reddit
I’ve always thought that ‘Westminster’ was such an old timey name for a font that was meant to evoke technology and futurism.
NightmareJoker2@reddit
This is correct. Though only in the sense that Westminster is only a typeface *inspired* by the visuals of E-13B, which only included 14 distinct characters, 10 of these decimal digits, and no system was designed to read the Westminster typeface in the same manner. If someone had tried, it might very well work. OCR does.
jason-reddit-public@reddit
There was a program called The Print Shop which let you make signs and banners on your 1980s dot matrix printer and this is one of the fonts that it came with so you would see it quite a bit.
IdealBlueMan@reddit
Fun fact: Frank Abagnale, The Great Imposter (who was portrayed in Catch Me If You Can), taught himself to write in this typeface by hand and mixed his own magnetic ink. He used that skill to forge checks.
Or so he claimed.
Shetland95@reddit
MARCH racecars comes to mind
Constant-Draw2629@reddit
Reminds me of the movie the black hole
bmiller218@reddit
TRON
Mysterious_Rule_7487@reddit
Im pretty sure i had this font on 386 in DOS typing program
mikegalos@reddit
And because MICR was designed for displaying routing, account and amount values it only had the 0-9 characters and a few de limiter special characters. All the letters are attempts to make a font that looked computery.
IdealBlueMan@reddit
Wasn’t it the other way around? MICR was designed to be electronically readable, so it got associated in the public mind with electronics. So various mass media went with that typeface when they wanted to portray something as futuristic.
mikegalos@reddit
That's what I said.
codefenix@reddit
The DOS game Digger used a font very similar to this, if not the very same.
https://www.digger.org
nmrk@reddit
I recently posted a link to a video about this precise project. I was surprised to see that the MICR system and bank transaction routing was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT.
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
This is commonly known as MICR, but in some instances it is also called OCR.
And no, it was never used to display information, the purpose was actually the opposite. This was so the computers in the 1960s could read text, either optically through a scanner or through magnetic ink.
When I was in the Marines in the 1980s and early 1990s, we had to use this font on every Officer Efficiency Report and NCO Efficiency Report we produced. These were locally generated, then mailed to Headquarters Marine Corps where they would be scanned into the computers, and had to be in this font.
Today, it's pretty much obsolete, and pretty much only lives on in checks because that is it's own standard and the equipment made to handle it is still in use to this day.
MuckFinggers@reddit
I feel like Dexter Laboratory cartoon used it all the time for computer screens.
locoluis@reddit
Some video games from the 1980s did use 8x8 pixel fonts inspired by this one, including:
AcousticShadow89@reddit
Alien 3 from the classic Game Boy as well!
Spocks_Goatee@reddit
I knew I've seen it used somewhere in games. It's gotten a lot of usage on new artwork for 70s sci-fi movies recently.
gushi@reddit
My first encounter with a font that looks like this was in the old-school Broderbund Print Shop where it was just called “Tech”. I wonder what the canonical origin of it was?
AddlepatedSolivagant@reddit
I made a font around 1990 by modifying Courier-9 (the "9" was the size because this was a bitmapped font) called "Programmer-9" with all of the dots enlarged: period, comma, colon, semicolon, and quotes. I need to be able to see distinctions in punctuation easily, so I emphasized just that part.
It was an incredibly useful font—I used it as the time. It never occurred to me to share it on a BBS or anything.
chuckop@reddit
Yep. That font was for computers to read, not to display.
ElevatorGuy85@reddit
Here’s one example of a book using this font on the cover, BASIC Computer Games, Volume II
https://archive.org/details/Basic_Computer_Games_Volume_II_1980_David_Ahl
I am pretty sure there were other volumes in this series with the same font on the cover. Somewhere I have one with a silver-colored cover and that same font.
And here’s a different book from other authors, but the same MICR-like font
https://qsl.net/wb4bxw/books/Computer%20Programming%20In%20Basic%20For%20Everyone.pdf
uberRegenbogen@reddit
“I'm miles and miles of files, pretty files, of your forefathers fruit. And now, to suit our great computer, you're magnetic ink!”
uberRegenbogen@reddit
The same syndrome as Hollywood OS.
Spocks_Goatee@reddit
The modified version of Cree Italic used for Star Trek TNG was misused in the same way. Suddenly it was haphazardly slapped on anything remotely futuristic, biggest problem is that the actual letter-type used on the show was never made public and most versions are bad imitations.
hdufort@reddit
Try displaying these characters with 8x8 or 9x7 bitmaps! Good luck!
Powerful_Wizard71@reddit (OP)
Someone tried though: https://typo.social/@drj/111261795922044114
hdufort@reddit
Very nice effort! 🤖
JasonMaggini@reddit
I had an Atari 800 back in the day. I bought a magazine with programs you could type in (Compute!, probably).
One program remapped characters to display graphics; I figured out how to adapt that section of the code and wrote a program to customize the on-screen font.
I spent a couple of days graphing this typeface out on paper, and coding the data that was needed to POKE the memory just right. Run the program, and voilà!
Powerful_Wizard71@reddit (OP)
Ahhh the old days when we designed sprites on graph paper...
RenderedMeat@reddit
It’s a quite horrid typeface for human readability. The capital D and O are very close looking. Letter spacing is super tight. And I don’t think there’s a lower case, or at least I’ve never seen it.
International-Pen940@reddit
Some OCR fonts did have lower case. A newspaper I interned at had reporters typing stories on Selectric typewriters to be scanned. If you made an error you had to overstrike it, but a few people used whiteout which was bad for the scanner. Even with the special font errors were fairly common. Fortunately this input method died out fairly fast.
sidusnare@reddit
This appears to be an attempt at OCR-A. Machine readable fine from the 60s.
DenpasOfTheWorld@reddit
FSOL FONT MENTIONED
RuhrpottPirat@reddit
Ain't that the font used in the first Terminator movie?
Starfireaw11@reddit
How is it that the D and the O are the same character just flipped horizontally, and yet I can't see them as anything other than the correct one?
This-Requirement6918@reddit
Actually used this as the system font for one of my graphic oriented portable computers from 1996. It's just a Windows machine that has a bunch of old graphic software on it.
AppendixN@reddit
Computers never used this font on screens, but it was everywhere in print. It was created for scanners to quickly recognize it in high-volume situations, like scanning checks or forms.
Everyone had seen it and knew it meant a computer was involved, so it became a convenient shorthand. And it worked well.
Vaddieg@reddit
Ok, 8-bit computers never existed then
xenomachina@reddit
8-bit computers didn't normally use this font.
However, there was definitely software for 8-bits that would use a font like this, usual.y in an attempt to look futuristic. I'm pretty sure i had a terminal program for the C64 that used a font like this, and GEOS came with a font, "Cory", that looked like this.
Vaddieg@reddit
It was a cheapest way to add some fancy look to the single and boring system font on RAM and ROM poor computer. You just print bottom half of character's bitmap 1 pixel shifted. Worked good for capitalized letters
new2bay@reddit
I know all those words, but I don’t know what they mean in that order.
Great_Specialist_267@reddit
Actually you could use it as a screen font from Windows 3.1 on (just most people didn’t).
joshu@reddit
historically they didn't use this font, this is some 90s microsoft font cosplaying.
the real thing is E13B, which was just numbers
AppendixN@reddit
I assume the OP is talking about all fonts that looked like this. E13B was the original, I think, but lots of other fonts were made to give that computer-readable look, even if they weren't the official MICR fonts.
Moore Computer (1968) was a very popular one, as well as Amelia (1964), Countdown (1965), Data Process (1969), Westminster (1969), and G.K.W. Computer (1970).
Whatever font the OP has posted fits neatly into the same category with all the rest of them.
agate_@reddit
The point is that only E13B was actually created to be computer-readable, all the other typefaces that look like it were just designed to mimic the style without actually serving that function. You're right that that started earlier than the '90s, sure.
Scoth42@reddit
The letters weren't used for scanning but they were everywhere "techy" for awhile. Every TV show and toy that was being computery used it in some way
DrZoidberg5389@reddit
TIL! Thanks!
jorfeo@reddit
Windows 98 plus space desktop theme had a font that was close enough. https://64.media.tumblr.com/64727e747c8da1bcb550ae5eb86f566c/tumblr_pn7p24PNsr1xkay4po1_400.png
rcampbel3@reddit
This font, Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (E-13B) was initially designed for check processing (go look at the bottom numbers on your checks now...) https://99percentinvisible.org/article/computer-age-typography-hybrid-legibility-explains-that-ubiquitous-check-font/ It was also intended to ensure that computer generated numbers and letters were unique and able to be interpreted by humans, mechanical systems, and computer systems as unique - much like the pronounced accents used by early telephone operators ensured that numbers weren't mis-heard over poor connections https://voicegal.wordpress.com/tag/telephone-operators/ and why the NATO phonetic alphabet exists for people that were communicating on one-way radios and walkie talkies https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a39297126/origin-of-the-nato-phonetic-alphabet/ , and why many of us learned to put a slash through zeroes, a line through the middle of sevens, and why engineering students got used to printed lettering in all caps.
So, while it seems like science fiction and something akin to 1950's ray guns from black and white movies, it serves a real purpose.
justeUnMec@reddit
Depends on your definition of displayed - it was certainly printed and read by plenty. I think the association predates the 80s, it was used in plenty of science fiction from far earlier.
As the ZX Spectrum was sold via mail order, plenty of cheques would have been written in exchange for that cheap old machine! Perhaps the inclusion of this font in advertising was supposed hint to our subconscious toward getting out our chequebooks!
But it was ubiquitous and seen regularly by all of us who carried chequebooks, up until late 2000s, although the frequency with which I wrote them dropped dramatically around 2010 - the last time I regularly used them was to pay for food delivery! I think I last saw it on the payment slip of an electricity bill recently but few go into a bank branch to pay any more so it's probably gone from them too now.
justeUnMec@reddit
Also, OP, your post is a bit of a paradox. As all our computers have now displayed that font, ergo, the statement written in that font on our computer screens is now false:)
Starshipfan01@reddit
Sci Gi is where I saw it. War games had it, I think just for the titles.
webjester32@reddit
Looks similar to the font look in the opening of The Terminator.
roaringmousebrad@reddit
It was used in a couple of television shows and probably a movie or two to seem "futuristic".
The one I remember fondly was Search, a James Bond-ish Super Agent series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8VUEZJdWAg
pyrulyto@reddit
Print Master (and before it The Print Shop) had a version of this font that was quite popular back in the day
Perlisforheroes@reddit
Killian is lying to you
anothercatherder@reddit
I hated this font used everywhere in "tech" in the 80s and 90s, but I was an insufferable gatekeeper who hated any idea of normies using computers, something that could be fun, or worse, something not technically accurate. This as a display font checked all three boxes.
Collarsmith@reddit
Back in the eighties I wrote a program for the Apple II-E to use this font, but aside from me and some friends, it was undistributed.
PaleDreamer_1969@reddit
Ummm, Print Shop has this font. Lol
HardlyRetro@reddit
I’m pretty sure this one of the available fonts in the 80’s DOS version of The Print Shop, so you could use it to make an 12-foot long Happy Birthday banner on your dot matrix printer.
xaranetic@reddit
That's a throwback! One of the best things about tractor feed paper
pnightingale@reddit
Flashback to Strong Bad Emails.
WhiteTrashInNewShoes@reddit
I don't care, reminds me of one of my favorite movies, Space Camp. To me, it IS what sci-fi/technology was back then
cjc4096@reddit
I was thinking it felt like a modernization of the NASA worm. Space Camp is probably most of it.
Fragrant_Difficulty6@reddit
Classic “Mandela Effect”
clamdomain@reddit
BS. My computer is displaying this font right now. In Your post.
sirjamesp@reddit
I found a similar Google font and use it on one of my websites.
nixiebunny@reddit
Yes, I am amused every time I see this font. It’s a stylistic merging of MICR and OCR-A.
Independent_Shoe3523@reddit
It's a font invented in the 50s to be used with personal checks. Printed with a certain kind of ink, the letters can be read with machines.
sonicjesus@reddit
This font was first seen on documents computers in the 60s were capable of reading. It was one of the first examples of computers to a generation of people who didn't really know what they were for to begin with.
BrobdingnagLilliput@reddit
Pretty sure Compute! or some Commodore-specific magazine published a program that let the C64 display text in a font like this!
Special-Wafer-8918@reddit
Lode runner vibes. I'm old.
nazihater3000@reddit
I had this font on the ZX Spectrum, UDG Fonts, you could do a bit of magic and remap your fonts, there's even an online archive, here's it https://damieng.com/typography/zx-origins/magnetic/
Aenoxi@reddit
You sure about that? :)
Powerful_Wizard71@reddit (OP)
Hm, the original font is different:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEeTqlZkjuw
Aenoxi@reddit
Heh. This is a hacked together PETSCI character ROM from the late 70s/early 80s. It's an early, purely cosmetic mod - it doesn't actually need to precisely replicate the MICR font. I've been using it for so long that the regular PET character set just looks weird to me now :)
Powerful_Wizard71@reddit (OP)
I thought so lol
DescriptionSame1057@reddit
Digger
by_in_ky@reddit
This!!!
Coupe368@reddit
I saw this font on the computer in one episode of the Simpsons that one time, probably.
LudasGhost@reddit
Didn’t Colossus use this font?
Powerful_Wizard71@reddit (OP)
Virtually all of sci-fi movies of the era have used that font!
teknogreek@reddit
7 y/o me: Why does the first root of the m look different.
PiratesOfTheArctic@reddit
Was this on space 1999 by any chance? I remember that font from tv but can't place it
KansasRFguy@reddit
I was just thinking the same thing, I do believe Space:1999 used something similar.
guitpick@reddit
Something similar to it was on the Mission Impossible 1988 intro.
PiratesOfTheArctic@reddit
Mission impossible!!! Sunday morning I'd watch this after breakfast! That was a proper tv series
letonai@reddit
lol, they show the guys doing something cool and all, the girl fixing her hair…. Lol
Nexzus_@reddit
Reminded that I had to leave FixedSys behind as my monitors became bigger. But looks like there are modern equivalents.
lw5555@reddit
I sure as heck loved using it in The Print Shop.
jhaluska@reddit
I used to work at a company founded around 1980 that used that font as their logo.
NorthernPlastics@reddit
Always loved MICR typefaces as a sign of a past future. See also (to a lesser extent) OCR-A.
lakosuave@reddit
I absolutely loved the aesthetics of this font and was a huge fan of computer imagery as an 80s kid. A few text base games in the C64 had a good approximation of this font and I stole it for some of my hokey games. I think I even clicked the font into GEOS letter by letter and printed out some school projects with it. And I loved Byte magazine :). I don’t disagree it was a trope but I loved it haha.
foofy@reddit
It is meant for print use. It's actually read like a barcode, which is why the vertical portions have varying width.
OwnPermission95@reddit
It makes perfect sense. This is a print typeface so of course it was printed often.
People were much more likely to see it in computer related contexts leading up to the 70s-80s so the association had already built up.
Js987@reddit
I always kind of loathed it due to overuse. I was aware it was for character recognition and not on screens at the time, because I was a weird kid.