Those Secret Fonts from the ISA-16 PS/2 Models (Again)

Here's a bit of an update on one of the more obscure little oddities in IBM PC history. To recap: certain PS/2 models (those based on the 16-bit ISA bus) have an extra set of screen fonts in their system ROMs, on top of the basic ones you get with every standard VGA BIOS. My first entry on the topic has the details on how they were actually meant to be used, and explains why this only really worked on some of the machines that had them - the PS/2 Models 30-286 and 25-286 (and those only in their very earliest BIOS revisions).

One thing that still wasn't clear was where they came from, or how they ended up in those BIOS ROMs. Well, there's good news for all you uncounted legions lying awake at night over this.

A while ago I was made aware of an interesting software package that made the rounds inside IBM around the late '80s, and went by the unlikely name of HOWARD the FONT (capitalization in original). Version 3.61 can be found here as a disk image, although that clearly wasn't the original distribution format: according to "what passes for documentation", it was originally published on an internal IBM 'conference' system as a pack of smaller archives. Below the prominent "IBM Internal Use Only" notice, we learn that it was authored at IBM's Austin, TX site by one Alan E. Beelitz - the same person who brought us the font management utilities in the Model 30-286's Starter Disk.

The title doesn't do this thing any favors, because HOWARD isn't just about fonts: it's more like the Swiss Army Knife of tweaking IBM PC text modes in surgically precise ways you didn't know you needed. The package seems to have been inspired by the ines­capable obser­vation that the video BIOS routines were slow, occasio­nally buggy, and generally a few pins short of a socket, and that the standard text styles weren't the pinnacle of type design either. What you get is a set of tools to make things a little better across the board: device drivers and command-line utili­ties to load and manage fonts, work around video BIOS bugs, tweak colors, and acce­lerate BIOS video output for (almost!) every display adapter that PCs could take at that point in time.

So if you're one of those rare (but undoubtedly fine-smelling) individuals who use an EGA card with the 5151 Monochrome Display and you find that its text output needs a little kick up the backside, or you'd like your DOS screen in swanky yellow-on-cyan without wasting precious memory on ANSI.SYS, or you just want to spruce up the character set of your MCGA or even your PC Convertible, then Howard (well, Alan) will fix you up. The fonts, utilitles and drivers are named after the author's col­leagues and co-conspirators: Howard W. Glueck is immor­talized in HOWARD and GLUECK (and thence in the suite's title), and Neil D. Lubart in - you guessed it - NEIL and LUBART, not to mention DAVID, HOLLY, WESLEY, WANDA, and probably half the occu­pants of that parti­cular office building. But let's have a look at what we're really here for.

Below are some samples of each style in HOWARD the FONT, not including the "NLSFONTS" (which cover the Latin/Multi­national code page 850, Arabic, and Cyrillic). The font lists and descriptions are as written up in HOWARD.ANN. For this image, they're all rendered in an 8x16 grid regardless of their actual height, but it should give you a fairly good idea of what they look like:

You could squint at these next to the above-mentioned PS/2 fonts and try to figure out the relationship, but I'll save you the ocular migraine: out of the PS/2 30-286's four extra fonts, three have exact duplicates in the HOWARD pack. The fourth is clearly based on yet another one, although they're not bit-for-bit identical.

--------------------    ------------------------
PS/2 30-286 ROM Font    Name in HOWARD the FONT
--------------------    ------------------------
Elite      E000:9F00    ELITE16.FNT (identical)
Oak8       E000:AF00    OAKLEY16.FNT (identical)
Oak9       E000:BF00    OAKLYB16.FNT (identical)
Sanserif   E000:CF00    HOWARD16.FNT (modified)

As for that last one on the list, below are both versions next to each other to high­light the diffe­rences (this time in VGA aspect, showing the character grid). HOWARD v3.61 is later than the original 30-286 BIOS ROM, so the HOWARD16 font repre­sents the tweaks and improvements; most of the modified characters were simply shifted around by one dot, but others were edited further. If there's still any doubt that the two fonts are related, the eagle-eyed amongst you will note that the glyph for ╘ (chara­cter D4h) has a stray pixel stuck to its top in both cases - something that evidently wasn't caught.

The PS/2 30-286's 'Sanserif' font

HOWARD the FONT's HOWARD16.FNT

We can start making sense of the timeline if we look at some dates. For reference, the earliest 30-286 BIOS (the only revision that plays nice with the Starter Disk's font utili­ties) is dated 25 Aug 1988, and the utili­ties themselves say 08 Jul 1988.

Now, in the absense of earlier versions of HOWARD the FONT, it's hard to tell for sure when this package was initially put together. Most of the files bear dates stamps from 1988-9, but some fonts like APL16 are as old as 1985; the two Oakley fonts (which appear in these PS/2 models as 'Oak8' and 'Oak9') have mid-1986 dates. ELITE16 is stamped 12 Dec 1988, although it's exactly the same as the version in the 'rev. 0' BIOS (some four months older). As for HOWARD16, the (revised) version in here says 7 June 1989.

Alan E. Beelitz was involved in the original revision of the BIOS; whether the HOWARD package already existed in mid-1988 or not, he evidently decided to throw in some extra fonts that he and his friends had come up with. By September 1989, these fonts were still being maintained and updated (HOWARD v3.61), although their BIOS equi­valents were already bit-rotting on the vine: as noted in the last article, the June 1989 BIOS revision had (inadver­tently?) shifted them around in ROM space, making the Starter Disk driver fail specta­cularly.

It's worth a chuckle when the author (at IBM Austin) takes a little swipe at the PC and PS/2 teams at Boca Raton, with his description of "BOCAPC16" (which is just the standard VGA ROM font). It's also a bit odd seeing 8x16 fonts dating from 1985/6, when none of IBM's PC adapters would have supported them (the EGA technically does, but that's non-standard and would limit you to 21 rows of text).

In the HOWARD.PAC file, you might also notice that the prog­ramming lan­guage is specified as TASM 1.0. IBM's own assem­blers back then were derived from MASM, which at the time was still pre-5.0, so I couldn't fault any IBMer who sprang for the compe­tition. Then again, we've already seen evidence that Hercules graphics cards were used internally at IBM, so this wasn't an isolated case of declining to "eat their own dog food".

The included text files make me sort of curious about the nature of the internal conference/forum/file-sharing system that was used to dist­ribute this within IBM, and about what "PCTOOLS" might be (obviously not the Central Point utility suite). File extensions like "FLSBIN" and tools like "LOADRAM" sure don't ring any bells, so if anyone has some back­round to share on this whole thing, it'd be nice to know.

As for the actual choice of fonts that ended up in the Model 30-286 ROM... My apologies to Richard Oakley; I'm sure he is a man of immacu­late talent and debonaire tastes, but I suppose everyone has their off days. The NEIL fonts would've made a better choice than the two 'Oak' variants - I was already mysti­fied that the latter were deemed worthy of inclusion, and now I'm positively bewil­dered to learn that they were "designed by a profes­sional typog­rapher". On the other hand, so was Lucida Console, and I think that's even more of an eyesore, so what do I know.