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[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.

[blusnowkitty]

In a video series from 1983 about the Macintosh's development

Do you have a link to this series?

[fri0701]

In a video series from 1983 about the Macintosh's development

Do you have a link to this series?

The series I'm referring to is this one:
https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/images/gartner/index.html

Unfortunately, it looks like the video files have been taken down. I'm glad I made a backup of them when I watched them years ago:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gdmuv47fxpz94lh/AADJ9WRFNgouDXruFooMwatXa?dl=1

It's a fascinating little series to watch all the way through. Plenty of Lisas make appearances, too!

[patrick]

Change your Dropbox URL to ...?dl=1 to get a direct download link. This skips the promotional stuff ("do you want to register ").

[mg.man]

> A better question to ask is probably what CAD package was Apple using back in the 80s?

Found this - https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2014/slides/pcb-fonts.pdf

Slide 21 points out the SE 'board as being "obviously CAD"

[mg.man]

This also makes an interesting read...
- http://www.applelogic.org/ApplesPCBs.html

[AlexTheCat123]

Thanks for sharing! That presentation and article were really interesting!

I definitely agree with blusnowkitty that PADS was probably the software that Apple was using back then, assuming they didn't make their own. The question is, how do we figure out what font(s) PADS used? I can't really find any info about older versions of the software, so i'm guessing that it will pretty tough to figure anything out!

[warmech]

Well, it's not pretty... but it is functional.

The character set in the attached image is all I could locate across the Lisa PCBs I have. If there are other characters, I can revise this if someone can provide an example. Altogether, I think this is a decent facsimile of the Lisa's silkscreen typeface.

[AlexTheCat123]

Wow! This is some really excellent work! I was really dreading having to recreate the font myself, so thank you so much for doing this!