[wink]

OK, does anyone actually remember if half of the systems of the 80s really had such perfect font rendering or is this just some emulation 'current version'?

The first computers I used were 486 with DOS and early Pentiums with Windows 3.11 and nothing looked nearly as nice. Some of those old screenshots look A LOT better than stuff 10 years later that I used (incl MacOS 8 or 9).

[WillAdams]

Older OSs had pixel fonts, which were carefully hand-crafted --- vector fonts were something which folks dreamed about having, or which were accessed when using incredibly expensive printers.

Font rendering on Windows 3.11 was pretty decent, so long as one used the nicer TrueType fonts --- Times New Roman and Arial had man _years_ of hinting effort by Monotype which kicked in at typically screen sizes --- that said, certain apps would still use the older pixel fonts Tms Rmn and Helv (over which Linotype sued for trademark infringement which is part of why Monotype got the contract) as well as the "vector fonts" Roman and Modern which are (one can still access them in Windows 11) stick/plotter fonts like to the Hershey fonts. When I bought my copy of Windows 3.0, I drove almost 100 miles into Richmond to get a copy of Adobe Type Manager 1.0 for Windows.

[masfuerte]

RISC OS (1987) had built-in support for anti-aliased vector fonts, though they aren't shown in the screenshot. The OS was in ROM and had insufficient space for the actual fonts so they needed to be loaded from disk. This was fine if you had a hard disk but a pita with floppies.

[WillAdams]

Need to find the time to try that out on a Raspberry Pi....

[lproven]

You really do. It is pretty much a work of art.

I have tried to persuade people a few times now. This may amuse.

2022:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/06/21/risc-os-is-3...

2024:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/05/02/risc-os-open...

I wish I could get the senior GNOME team to use RISC OS for a while. It is so very visible that GNOME >= 3.x is a Windows copy with things removed and re-arranged, because that's all anyone on board has seen or knows.

[WillAdams]

For me, my high-water mark for GUI experience/consistency was using Go Corp.'s PenPoint OS on an NCR-3125 when mobile, and a NeXT Cube (w/ a Wacom ArtZ) when at my desk --- nothing since has been as nice and consistent and reliable.

[lproven]

I believe you.

I never touched a real PenPoint device, sadly. I never got to use a real NeXT cube -- they were formidably expensive over on my side of the Atlantic, the price of a _high end_ new car before I could afford a car at all.

I own an original copy of NeXTstep with manuals and have run it inside Previous, but it's not the same.

[pjc50]

The monitors of the time were a lot blurrier than the screen you're looking at the screenshots on. For maximum verisimilitude you'd have to have photographs of screens.

I got an 800x600 LCD monitor in about 1999, and it was a massive upgrade.

[zozbot234]

It's a tradeoff. A 800x600 CRT will look "blurry" compared to a LCD when rendering old-style GUIs or text in a properly hinted font, but the 800x600 LCD will look blocky and pixelated when rendering a real-world photorealistic image compared to the CRT. The real look of that CRT is more like taking that old 800x600 photo and upscaling it to 1440x1080 on a modern FullHD display. Blurry to be sure, but not blocky or pixelated. Early LCDs also had terrible image persistence/ghosting issues that showed up when playing games.

[red_admiral]

I think the factor here is that the screens were CRTs.

[hulitu]

Font rendering was better. Today the fonts are scaled up or down or both and the rendering is hit or miss.