[kumarishan]

This is certainly a well researched one. And seeing so many versions throughout the history, does make me think, if some is going to change it again :).

Well Steve Jobs introduced fonts to computer. Something that he stole from the hands of specialized calligraphers and enabled everyone to produce great content.

[Curmudgel]

> Well Steve Jobs introduced fonts to computer.

What? First of all, I think that you're confusing typefaces and fonts. A computer font is computer code that describes how the size and shape, orientation, etc. of a collection of glyphs should be output onto the screen. Computers had successfully output text to a screen for decades before the Macintosh.

The Xerox Star, which came out in 1981, three years before the Apple Macintosh, had sans-serif and serif typefaces:

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-8...

The Macintosh might have been the first popular commercially available machine that offered several computer fonts, but Jobs certainly did not come up with the idea.

[rjsw]

The MIT Lisp Machine source tree contains Times Roman and Helvetica fonts dating from 1977.

[Curmudgel]

I didn't mean to suggest that the Star was the first commercial computer that offered multiple fonts. I picked the Star because it came before the Macintosh there were good pictures of it available. I believe that the Alto also had a font that set a typeface in cursive, and even came with its own font editor, but I'd have to look harder to find videos or pictures of that.

[rjsw]

I think you were correct to identify the Star (or at least the prototype of it), The article on the history of Smalltalk that was posted yesterday gives a date of 1972 for the first Xerox PARC font editor.

[MaysonL]

There were computerized type-setters well before the Mac. Back in the 70's, I wrote a fair amount of page-layout software, as well as a program to convert scanned logos into fonts. (Bask in the day when there were three USA manufacterers of airliners [each airline had to get its own version, and sometimes more than one version] we did publication of maintenance manuals for Boeing, Lockheed and McDonnel-Douglas) Full screen editor with variable font size, even all the way down to birds-eye view, but using vector graphics rather than pixels.