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8×19 text mode font origins

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Ever wanted to know everything about a specific 8×19 font Intel used for the POST and BIOS screens on its motherboards? OS/2 Museum’s Michal Necasek has you covered.

The obvious remaining question is, who came up with 8×19 fonts for BIOS use? Was it really Intel? Or was it someone else? Note that the Intel boards were used by many OEMs (including but not limited to AST, Dell, Gateway, HP, Micron, Packard Bell) so just because an OEM system uses an 8×19 font doesn’t mean there isn’t Intel behind it.

↫ Michal Necasek

Great weekend reading, as always, from Necasek.

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One Response

  1. 2025-08-16 4:04 pm
    sukru Silver Supporter

    The screenshot was taken by digitizing the analog VGA output of a physical AN430TX board with an integrated ATI Rage 3D graphics chip. The VGA connector was plugged into a Lantronix Spider KVM, which was used to save the screenshot.

    Casually dropping they have a “VGA in” option.

    Thinking back, I used to have an “IP KVM” device back in the day. But never thought about using it for capture.

    The rationale was probably the same that led Intel to using these fonts a decade earlier. 8×19 fonts enable standard 80×25 text using a basic VGA 640×480 resolution. This works well on flat panels which cannot dynamically change resolution like analog monitors.

    … although the 8×19 fonts were a great fit for flat panels, there was too much software which assumed standard 8×16 fonts and relied on that to render, say, a “graphical” mouse cursor in text modes.

    Yes, this is a shame. I used to do “text graphics” back in the day in DOS, but it was always a bit awkward. A font that actually scaled to proper aspect ratio of the screen would have been much awesome.

    Yes, this was a good read…