: What is the font used on the computer in "The Mother of All Demos"? Any idea what this font is? See more of it: http://archive.org/details/XD300-23_68HighlightsAResearchCntAugHumanIntellect

@Vandalay110

I think that demo was 1968, and the background is that the people involved with its development worked on optical (and magnetic) character recognition (OCR) with respect to banking.

The CRT screens and controller used appear to have been custom-made for the purpose, but earlier experiments were done with Control Data Corporation (CDC) display terminals. CDC was an OCR pioneer: they thought it would be an improvement over punch cards to have people type up their programs using a custom typeface and scan it in (they were not aware what a how difficult the problem really was).

The typeface itself is all over the place with respect to baseline, kerning, tracking etc. Also, it has no lower case letters. The closest you will find probably is OCR-B which originally hails from the early 70s I think.

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@Kaufman565

Man, that's a cool font. However I don't think it's actually a FONT, given that this is from 1958. The closest thing I can think of is Courier New in CAPS, but with the letters staggered. I think you would have to painstakingly rearrange each letter to achieve that effect. It would be worth it for a banner or something, but not for an entire website, unless you're a very patient person! There also seem to be some highlights and soft focus effects... yes, try Courier New, all CAPS, and then play with the highlights and shadows, and focus. That's what I'd do in the sandbox, anyhow!

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