It never ceases to amaze me that the IBM PC got these fonts when IBM big iron terminals had a much nicer, modern geometric sans serif font. They just needed to use the 5100 font or terminal fonts they were already using.
That's part of the reason I've added more fonts from more compatibles: some of them had much nicer ones - the Cordata and Wyse machines in particular more than doubled the resolution of the original IBM fonts, and indeed achieved something quite close to that 'classic terminal' look.
The IBM PC was meant to support both color and monochrome displays though ("color" meaning "cheap TV-resolution CGA" :-)), and there are hints that both functions were originally supposed to go on the same adapter board. That plus cost cutting are probably why the same ROM chip contained both the color and monochrome fonts, so neither of them could have been very high-res...
Yep! They seemed to be quite proud of it in the PPC-400 User's Guide. It goes on to describe the availability of various character attributes (reverse video, underlining, blinking, intensity) as "part of Corona's continuing effort to provide you with the finest and most advanced products".
Definitely a well-done design. If it wasn't for the ToshibaSat 8x14 font (also included), that'd be my code editor font of choice now.
Yeah, I really hated the standard IBM font too... trying to look like a serif font and having to "fall back" to sans serif most of the time anyway because there just wasn't enough space for the serifs... why?! And the patterns drawn with the standard background "pattern characters" looked horrible in the 80x25 mode which was used most of the time, because the hardware inserted an extra column repeating the 8th column, so the font matrix was actually 9x16, but the font didn't account for that.
Actually back in the bad old DOS days I went as far as realizing that it was really easy to replace the "default" font (at least on German/non-US machines, which installed a different font from a file which contained the correct characters for the German code page). So I wrote a small program to hack this code page file and insert my own sans-serif font. An additional realization was that 8 = 3+1+3+1 - so if you designed your "pattern characters" to have 2 "patterned" columns 3 pixels wide and 2 empty columns 1 pixel wide (so the repeated column would be empty too), the pattern would look nicer when shown in the 9x16 matrix. I wonder if I still have that laying around somewhere...
Likely because the IBM PC project was a very rushed job, by IBM standards. It was built rather quickly using as much as possible off the shelf hardware and software. Due to the buacr bureaucratic nature of the company of the time, the project was largely kept from the rest of the company. That's why they outsourced DOS
When the project started, they were way way behind in the home PC market
The 5100, 5110, and 5120 computers had a simple sans serif font, with a distinctive narrow zero. The 3270, 3150, and 5250 terminals also shared a very nice design (which was copied into x3270's), with distinctive 6's, 9's and the dotted rounded 0 (that made it easier to distinguish from the squarer O). The 3270 also had the peculiarity of having the digits being slighly taller than the letters.
I'm not sure which was the first machine that had the distinctive MDA look that flowed into CGA, EGA, and VGA. Could be something created for the PC.
If all else failed, it'd be nicer if they just did like Commodore and copied the Atari 8-bit one with wide stems. The NTSC output for the CGA board more or less mandated the wide stems to prevent color artifacts.
