General Category > LisaList2
Lisa Silkscreen Font
AlexTheCat123:
As you guys probably know, I've been working on replicas of a bunch of Lisa PCBs lately and so far I've been able to get everything really accurate to the originals, with the exception of one thing: the silkscreen font. I've taken some pictures of the text and ran them through those websites that identify fonts from images, but I can't find anything that's a perfect match. The closest thing I've been able to find is the Monaco font, which I've used on all of my boards so far, but it's still not even close to identical. Now that I'm working on doing the I/O board, which has way more text on it than the other PCBs that I've done, it would be really nice to find the exact font that Apple used. Does anybody know what that font is?
blusnowkitty:
A better question to ask is probably what CAD package was Apple using back in the 80s? Scavenging through my parts piles, it looks to me like Apple used the same family of CAD software from the Lisa / IIe all the way up until at least the Rev A / B iMac G3s. By the G4 Sawtooth I think they had moved on to a new package.
AlexTheCat123:
Good idea! Maybe I'll look through some Apple documents on BitSavers to see if I find any references to a particular CAD program.
blusnowkitty:
Some other starting points might be... Apple's current job listings for board layout engineers require experience with Allegro Cadence (might be too new; Wikipedia states the company formed in '88 after the acquisition of a company founded in '82) and Mentor Graphics (now Siemens), I'm assuming PADS (Mentor being founded in 1981, which is probably closer in-line with our Lisa / IIe timeframe). Tony Fadell mentions laying out a custom ASIC in '89 with Mentor Graphics software over here, https://twitter.com/tfadell/status/1524124560030724097
One thing I noticed while looking at pictures of 80s Apple boards is that the C, D, and R have very distinct strokes in them. And of course, this is all assuming that Apple didn't just make up their own CAD package themselves.
fri0701:
In a video series from 1983 about the Macintosh's development, there's a short clip of some software that looks like it's being used to design a chip layout on a motherboard. Perhaps someone with more experience in this area could help identify what tool this is? Perhaps it's related to what was used on the Lisa, or could point you in the right direction.
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