On Sun, May 14, 2023 at 2:17 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

Hello, I've just today secured purchase of an original 4BSD manual and papers set and a copy of what I believe is the V6 papers set as well. Of note amongst the tabs I could read from the pictures of the Berkeley binder was a section of fonts that I don't think I've seen before named the Berkeley Font Catalog. I did a bit of searching around and didn't find anything matching that on first inspection re: scanned and source-available BSD doc collections. Anyone got the scoop on this?

Sure

The Berkeley Font Catalog was a collection of 200 bpi fonts that could be used with vcat - the virtual CAT/4 typesetter and old tools like some of the original EE cad editors like Ken Keller's and another from Tom Ferrin at UCSF. The bulk of them was a copy of the Hershey Fonts [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey_fonts] and a number of fonts specialty fonts, such as a set for typing chess, that had been developed originally for the XGP at CMU, MIT, and Stanford. Between the 3 ARPAnet sites, there was a lot of mixing and matching. Note: I should have a Xerox copy of them from one of the UCB docs in my files. They are on a BSD tape, I would look in the contributed area, but I don't remember. There is likely troff input to print the catalog (using vcat), but again I am trying to remember where any of that was in the distribution kits.

FWIW: a few months back, Rob has corrected the history that the original vcat(1) was Canadian in origin. I thought that Ferrin had his hand in an early version that came to UCB (This is likely an example of the side comment sometimes used, that joy peed on it to make things smell like UCB, as Tom was across the bay). I also thought Tom had collected much of the catalog originally; and while I could be smoking something here -- I seem to remember that he also had some sort of Stanford connection with some of his graphics work [the UCSF and Stanford medical schools - were doing 3D graphics for medical diags at some point]. Tom was a graphics guy, and I know he was mixed up in some of that so it would have made sense for him to be somehow involved. It was not for a few years later, when Barskey showed up at UCB that there was any serious graphics work being done -- before that, only ECAD tools like's Ken and later Oster's.

Clem