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Moritz F. Furst

Smalltalk Type

An ongoing restoration project of the typefaces used in the graphical
user interface of the Smalltalk-80 system.

Screenshot of a Smalltalk-80 interface, with three white views open
on a gray background The Smalltalk-80 interface, this screenshot was
taken using Dan Banay's implementation

Like so many, I have been fascinated by Smalltalk, particularly
because of the vision of computing it represents.^1 I am also very
fond of those early PARC GUIs and their aesthetic. After playing
around with Smalltalk-80 recently, I wanted to know more about its
typefaces and have versions of them for my own use.

The Typefaces of Smalltalk-80

Somewhat ironically, the fonts used in Smalltalk-80 (which was the
"release version", the first variant made available outside of PARC)
were a substantial regression from the bespoke designs and elaborate
features the PARC Learning Research Group had going on for the Alto
and earlier versions of Smalltalk. The Alto not only supported raster
/bitmap fonts, but also high-quality "spline fonts", where the
outline of a glyph shape is represented with a series of curves:
Essentially the ancestor of how we use fonts today. PARC had built
interactive font editors both for outline ("Fred") and raster
("PrePress") type.^2 Several Alto fonts were proportionally-spaced,
and included numerous special characters.

Earlier versions of Smalltalk included a number of typefaces, perhaps
the most memorably is Cream by Bob Flegal, based on a design by Alan
Kay.^3 Cream later gained additional fame when Bill Atkinson
converted it to the Lisagraf font format and it became the first
system font of the Macintosh. Apple's Smalltalk implementation also
used Cream:

Screenshot of the Macintosh Smalltalk-80 interface, with three white
views open on a gray background Smalltalk-80 for the Macintosh, this
screenshot was taken running the 0.3 Release on System 6 in the Mini
vMac emulator

For the Smalltalk-80 release, these all were axed. Alan Kay notes in
The Early History of Smalltalk:^4

    Only a few changes had to be made to the NoteTaker Smalltalk-78
    to make a releasable system. Perhaps the change that was most
    ironic was to turn the custom fonts that made Smalltalk more
    readable (and were a hallmark of the entire PARC culture) back
    into standard pedestrian ASCII characters. According to Peter
    Deutsch this "met with heated opposition within the group at the
    time, but has turned out to be essential for the acceptance of
    the system in the world."

The "heated opposition" of which Kay writes becomes more
understandable when we realise how the move back to ASCII was not a
matter of typographic flourishes of the interface. It directly
impacted the Smalltalk language.^5 What Kay glosses over here as
"more readable" has nothing to do with a nice type design. The custom
fonts of the Alto had a function. For example, in Smalltalk-76, you
would copy an element from an array to another like this:

a * i - b * i

Very elegant and visually expressive. With no special characters
available, the syntax had to be changed. In Smalltalk-80, this
statement would eventually look like this:

a at: i put: (b at: i)

Less "readable" indeed.

I don't yet know why the earlier typeface designs were not kept with
a reduced ASCII character set. The four simple fonts that shipped
with Smalltalk-80 have generic names, perhaps reflecting the team's
opinion on them: Sans-Serif10, Sans-Serif12, Serif10, and Serif12.
They all have regular, italic and bold variants. The letters are
proportional, not fixed-width:

I quite like these pedestrian ASCII character glyphs, and I believe
they deserve to be converted for contemporary use. They somehow have
a wonderfully friendly character.

Unfortunately, I could not yet find out who actually designed them.
My guess would be that they were made by Robert Flegal as well
(Please email me if you have any information!)

Restoration

The project builds on Leah Neukirchen's BDF release of the regular
weight of Sans-Serif10 in 2021. Leah was also kind to confirm a trace
of the glyphs to be more practical than trying to decode whatever
format these fonts are in in the Smalltalk-80 environment.

"Sans-Serif10" typed out for subsequent redrawing from the
screenshot. Curiously, I also found two ligatures by accident. While
'fl' does not differ from simply printing the 'f' and 'l' characters
after each other in Sans10, the 'ffi' is custom: the 'f' crossbars
are connected!

The glyph shapes and spacing widths were reconstructed from the
original Xerox virtual image tape shared by Mario Wolczko, using the
excellent Smalltalk-80 implementation by Dan Banay. After consulting
- what else - Adele Goldberg's documentation to remind myself how to
change fonts in the editor, I sampled the typefaces.

The bold variant of "Sans-Serif10", with a pixel overlay to
reconstruct the glyph shapes and letter spacing

Eventually, I hope to have time to restore all four of them, and also
make extended character sets available-- This is a work in progress.

You can currently see some cuts of Sans10 in action on my micro blog.

Downloads

Nota bene: I don't have a Windows system or a low-res display at hand
for testing, and I'm not a professional type designer by any stretch
of the imagination. Please send me a report if the non-bitmap
versions of these fonts don't perform as they should.

License: Bitmapped (pixel) fonts, since they are considered
computerized representations of a typeface, are not copyrightable in
the U.S. We can therefore consider the Smalltalk-80 typefaces to be
public domain. The fonts made available here are under OFL.

Smalltalk Sans10

Smalltalk Sans10 is a faithful restoration of the "Sans-Serif10" 10px
typeface. The character set covers the original printable ASCII.
Compared to Leah's BDF version of the regular weight, Smalltalk
Sans10 Regular differs in a few glyph shapes and spacings (most
notably 'P' and 'R', which are 1px wider in her version than what I
reconstructed from Smalltalk-80).

The downloads include the whole family.

  * BDF (.zip)
  * Panic Playdate (.zip)
  * TTF (.zip)
  * OTF (.zip)

Smalltalk Sans10 Extended

This version of Sans10 features an extended character set. I have
tried my best to match the style and spirit of the original in the
design of the additional glyphs. Extended supports ISO-Latin-1, plus
a few extra characters (mostly based on my own needs). In Extended,
the arrows that represent the circumflex and the underscore in the
original character set have been moved to the arrows block (U+2191
and U+2190), replaced by proper circumflex and underscore glyphs. The
grave accent also has been replaced, the glyph shape has been moved
to U+2018. Extended comes with special glyphs: The caret (U+2038) is
Smalltalk-80's cursor, and the Personal Computer (U+1F4BB) is, of
course, the Alto.

I'm not fully happy with all the glyphs yet, but you can already test
drive the Regular:

  * BDF (.zip)
  * Panic Playdate (.zip)
  * TTF (.zip)
  * OTF (.zip)
  * WOFF, WOFF2 (.zip)

Here is a table of the included glyphs:

Changelog:

  * 26 March 2023: Added Sans10 Extended Regular v0.003
  * 24 March 2023: Added Playdate version of Sans10
  * 23 March 2023: Initial release, Sans10 Regular, Sans10 Italic,
    Sans10 Bold

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 1. You can try many different emulated Smalltalk environments -
    including Smalltalk-80 - in your web browser at Dan Ingalls'
    "Smalltalk Zoo". More resources on the history of Smalltalk can
    be found at the Computer History Museum. -

 2. Sproull, Bob. 1977. Font Representations and Formats. Internal
    Report. Palo Alto, CA: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Available
    on archive.org). For explanations of the font production process,
    including depictions of the font editors, see Baudelaire,
    Patrick. [1985] 2016. "The Xerox Alto Font Design System."
    Visible Language. 50 (2):13-25 (Available online); and Sproull,
    Robert F. 2018. "The Xerox Alto Publishing Platform." IEEE Annals
    of the History of Computing. 40 (3):38-54. doi: 10.1109/
    MAHC.2018.033841110 -

 3. Ingalls, Dan, Bert Freudenberg, Ted Kaehler, Yoshiki Ohshima, and
    Alan Kay. 2014. Reviving Smalltalk-78: The First Modern Smalltalk
    Lives Again. Presentation. International Workshop on Smalltalk
    Technologies, 19 August 2014, Cambridge. (PDF, p.9) -

 4. Kay, Alan C. 1993. "The early history of Smalltalk." ACM SIGPLAN
    Notices. 28 (3):69-95. doi: 10.1145/155360.155364 p.87 -

 5. Ingalls, Daniel. 2020. "The Evolution of Smalltalk: From
    Smalltalk-72 through Squeak." Proceedings of the ACM on
    Programming Languages 4(HOPL): Article 85 doi: 10.1145/3386335
    pp.57-58. I'm reproducing Dan's example here. -

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  * Planted 23. March 2023
  *  
  * Last tended 26. March 2023

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