breastle screen for HLA Adventure Need help designing one 967

Randall Hyde

The Wikipedia article about codepage 437 1 seems to imply they actually did:

The repertoire of CP437 was taken from the character set of Wang word-processing machines, as explicitly admitted by Bill Gates in the interview of him and Paul Allen in the 2nd of October 1995 edition of Fortune Magazine:

"... we were also fascinated by dedicated word processors from Wang, because we believed that general-purpose machines could do that just as well. That's why, when it came time to design the keyboard for the IBM PC, we put the funny Wang character set into the machine--you know, smiley faces and boxes and triangles and stuff. We were thinking we'd like to do a clone of Wang word-processing software someday."

I do not know the background story to this, but I could speculate that the BIOS of the original IBM PC, the default font in the ROM of the original MDA graphics adapter, and all related things were probably designed in close co-operation with Microsoft (as they were the ones contracted to deliver the operating system and the ROM BASIC for the machine), so they had their say about the glyphs which went into it.

-- znark