Post #1211453

2026-04-16 07:03 UTC

I keep thinking about a talk I saw by Ferdinand Ulrich, archivist of early digital fonts. Ulrich showed how institutions have huge archives, with reports and books and correspondence of people from the type world exploring how analog typography could be used on the computer. The birth of digital typography! You could read all the back-and-forth that went into establishing standards, exporing new ideas, creating prototypes. When the world wide web became common, much of this obviously moved to the digital world. Until ~2010 people were still in the habit of printing and archiving important mails, but after that? #retrocomputing #typography #retrogaming #archives

Replies (2)

@pixelambacht@typo.social 2026-04-16 07:08

What digital archives are there at the level of these physical archives at institutions? Or so we need to move these digital archives into the physical world? Wikipedia and the Internet Archive might have some of the bigger, public, stuff stored as ones and zeroes. The W3C probably too. But what if in 40 years someone wants to know how jQuery came to be? Or MooTools, EOT fonts, Firebug, PHP MVC frameworks? HarfBuzz or TTX? I'm not even sure what's making me so uneasy about this. Digital archiving is easy, and also easily lost, maybe? #retrocomputing #typography #retrogaming #archives

Open ##1417089
@slye@typo.social 2026-04-16 14:07

@pixelambacht Two and a half years ago, @stewf and I were at Adobe in San Jose looking through a room filled with boxes of, as you say, reports and books and correspondence from the Type team. There is plenty of uninteresting paperwork in the mix, so it’s a lot of work to dig through and find the hidden gems. I’m hoping, though, that the good stuff gets preserved and maybe digitized someday.

Open ##1417092