zlacker

> Berkeley Mono wears a UNIX T-shirt and aspires to be etched on control panels in black synthetic lacquer. It is Adrian Frutiger visits Bell Labs. It is Gene Kranz's command. It operates with calibrated precision and has a datasheet.

It costs $75 for an individual license, not really in the spirit of UNIX

>>humani+(OP)
Really? In Ye Olde Dayes, there was some pretty pricey Unix software.

>>humani+(OP)
Yeah, every time a typeface is shared on here it is met with some opposition since most cost money for individuals/personal use. I understand it's hard to take the time to design a nice typeface and that the creators should be compensated for their work, but sadly it means fonts like these are practically limited to commercial use. I wonder if there's a better way to turn a profit on typefaces - there's been a handful of really interesting ones posted on HN I've wanted to try.

>>jamesh+s1
There is a ton of entitlement nowadays, that's for sure.

One should be grateful to those who do release their hard work to the public domain or under a FOSS license, rather than being resentful toward those who don't.

People absolutely deserve to be compensated for their work, if they so choose, and they are absolutely permitted to release their work under any license they want.

>>Finnuc+U
I remember the days of $800/cpu for a System V R2 license with no outline fonts :)

>>jamesh+s1
You might be interested in futurefonts.xyz. Kind of like Kickstarter for fonts. You pay for typefaces in development. Price goes up as more features and components get added but you get everything that’s included when you buy it and then everything that’s added afterward for no additional cost.

>>humani+(OP)
> It costs $75 for an individual license, not really in the spirit of UNIX

Eh, I think it’s a fair price, a. And b, pretty apt when you consider most Unixes were priced per core. BSD/OS itself was $1000 back in the day, according to my research, which was cheaper than System V, but obviously still expensive.

Linux was created for a reason.

And here I’ll refrain from making a snarky remark about how someone should make a similar font that is lower quality but will be way more popular.

>>humani+(OP)
UNIX was an internal and then commercial product of ATT bell labs (and later Novell). You're misconstruing it with the FOSS movement.

UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service, and then later sold and licensed to other companies to likewise improve their internal computer usage. UNIX was not created to be zero cost. Apparently a commercial license for UNIX cost $20k at the time (or $150 for universities/educational institutions).

edit: IMHO $75 one time is a fair price for a premium font. Designers regularly pay $300 or more for typefaces they use in their work. There are monthly subscriptions to font foundries that cost more too.

>>humani+(OP)
One of the strongest indicators that FOSS has eaten the world is that we've all forgotten that UNIX licenses used to be thousands of dollars.

And that's before you even bought the compiler license!

>>qbasic+v8
It was certainly not created to sell more telephone service. It was a research project that found applications to run on it, most of which had little if anything to do with telephone service at first. Much later UNIX was adapted to run telephone network equipment.

>>humani+(OP)
uhh, unix was insanely expensive.

>>humani+(OP)
Not to pile on, but I will say, for the record that it's UNIX® :)

>>qbasic+v8
UNIX was created for ATT to sell more telephone service

From where did you get this idea? Citation needed.

>>Turing+V3
I think the problem is more that the costs feel exorbitant with respect to both the perceived effort and utility. 75$ is half a year of Netflix - a product clearly born of extensive multi-disciplinary effort - which can't but feel excessive given that the marginal utility of a font is just so low.

I guess I could summarize as saying that an expensive[0] font just isn't, or more strongly, can't be interesting.[1]

[0]More than a cup of coffee, or so. [1]For personal use, marginal benefits scale differently on e.g. a billboard

>>gjvc+kk
Big if true! Acoustic coupler modems had only existed for a few years when Unix development started, and ARPANET was starting around the same time. It would be an impressive amount of foresight if they predicted that demand for computer networking would become high and that existing OS's would be somehow ill-suited for running its infrastructure.

>>Finnuc+U
Heck, I remember OpenStep costing around $700 back in the 90’s.

>>Aloha+xd
Bell labs was doing research for AT&T, a telephone service company.

>>gjvc+kk
AT&T was in the business of selling telephone service. Bell labs (AT&T owned) was where UNIX was created. Why else would AT&T be researching computer systems if not to broaden and improve their marketshare in telecommunications?

>>therei+kl
Netflix is entertainment, typefaces have a LOT more utility in my life. Maybe I'm weird because I regularly purchase typefaces but $75 is a STEAL. Holy shit.

The commercial license for this is also a steal.

Seems like on here, free typefaces are desired but a lot of these free typefaces are released by multi-million dollar corporations...they have someone on payroll to work on them.

I welcome indie typographers.

>>blt+Op
There were an enormous amount of problems in the telephone space that they hoped computers would resolve, like replacing the army of human operators with computer controlled switches.

>>qbasic+Ou
My understanding of Bell Labs is that it was funded via a 1% flat "tax" on all Bell System operating companies, and that internally it had no central mission. That's why all kinds of non-telecommunication advancements have come from it: radio astronomy, DNA sequencing machines, solar cells, etc.

I can't find an article for it, but I remember reading somewhere that AT&T's extravagant research budget and forays outside of telecommunications were partially a defensive maneuver: AT&T was aware that the US government could dismantle its monopoly at any moment, and invested heavily in R&D as a token of good faith.

>>qbasic+v8
The historical origin that I learned for UNIX was that it was created mostly out of frustration with Multics, and that its original "primary" use was running one of Ken Thompson's video games[1]. It was originally written for a PDP-7, which was already obsolete at the time and probably wasn't a target for telecommunications software.

It was only much later (and after significant arm twisting for more computing resources) that AT&T took UNIX seriously. Even then, the first marketed versions of UNIX were oriented towards programmers and technical editors, not telecommunication[2].

[1]: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.pdf

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PWB/UNIX

>>qbasic+Ou
You should read Kernighan’s “UNIX A History and a Memoir”. Seriously a great book.

UNIX was created with no purpose in mind other than to get some MULTICS-like functionality out of an old machine and not worry about design-by-committee.

The first real use for it was document processing and it took off from there. Never was a telecom system ever at AT&T AFAIK and didn’t do networking until much later.

There were no “teams” there, just someone would see what someone else was working on and dive in to help. Stick a bunch of smart people in a building and see what comes out.

R&D at Bell Labs was to play with ideas first and then find an application. That’s how we got the transistor and UNIX, and waaaay more things that never saw the light of day.

That mode of R&D is dead now. It was dying even as UNIX was being developed, and they got management cover. The use for speeding up technical documentation really was the first business value justification. That was also how they managed to get the PDP-11 and how C got created for the port.

>>qbasic+Hu
Much of what Bell Labs researched had little direct application to Telephones.

Bell Labs did a tremendous amount of basic research, materials science, and things with no direct commercial application.

>>qbasic+Ou
So you have no idea beyond an opinion?

>>NetOpW+1w
I totally get why they charge, and for what they do - can't blame anyone for not working for free - I just genuinely can't picture a value proposition in the product commiserate with the effort.

At least personally, I find fonts are something that normalize very quickly. If I change the font on my text editor, I'd notice for a day or so but then it would cease to be 'a font' and go back to being 'words on screen'. I've only really noticed 'displeasure' at a working font[1] when I've got two machines and the settings wind up desynced so one doesn't look like 'how it's supposed to' according to my brain.

[0]e.g. if Hacker News changed its font I really might not notice.

[1]Exempting crap like Papyrus

>>therei+kl
> given that the marginal utility of a font is just so low.

Then... don't buy it? I mean, it's not like there aren't hundreds of other fonts to choose from, many of which are free.

>>farley+o5
One downside of futurefonts.xyz is that each font comes with a different license. Bit of a headache to keep track of the individual Terms & Conditions as a typical user who might want to use a couple of fonts in a project. Really wish that fonts were sold under more standardized commercial licenses.

At least with many open & free fonts, the SIL Open Font License is practically the standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIL_Open_Font_License

>>woodru+19
I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard that the AT&T-initiated compiler “debundling” was the thing that kick-started the popularity of the GNU userland, with GCC acting as the gateway drug. So not only are these facts related, they are apparently even causally so.