History of Mac system fonts

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Continuing the discussion from What are macOS Sonoma Mail's default fonts?:

As a sidebar, and (I assume) coincidentally, Howard Oakley just released an article about the history of Mac system fonts:

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And we should not forget the original Claris, the lovely and unique DogCow from the first Mac:

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It still amuses me to see the outline version of Chicago used as a display (or even text) font. Chicago was very carefully designed to look good as a bitmap at a specific resolution, and just looks weird as an outline font.

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There’s a paper on the development of the TrueType versions of the original Macintosh “City” fonts that covers some of the design tradeoffs that were made to preserve the spirit of the Susan Kare bitmap fonts while making them fully modern outline fonts:

Notes on Apple 4 Fonts

Macintosh Chicago is a distinctive design. There are few faces quite like it in traditional typography, even among so-called “display” faces, used for headlines and titling. Because Chicago is deeply integrated into the Macintosh System, used in menus, titles, etc., it is a fundamental part of the look of the Macintosh. Tochange the design would be to change the look of the Mac user-interface, and neither Apple nor B&H wanted to do that. Therefore, we designed TrueType Chicago to produce bitmaps that would be nearly bit-for-bit identical to the standard bitmap Chicago at 12 point on the screen.

The work was done by Bigelow & Holmes, who also did the Lucida family used in Mac OS X.

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Thanks. Do you know of a source for modern implementations of these classic fonts?

Geneva and Monaco are still included with macOS, but Chicago and New York are not.

I have downloaded ChicagoFLF written by Robin Casady, and was released into public domain after the demise of Casady & Greene, but I would love to get a copy of the original Apple TrueType version.

Maybe I just need to go digging through my old Mac system installer CDs. I wonder if the files from System 7 can still be used today…

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FontBook will happily import the old TrueType suitcases. I think my copies came from an OS 9 Mac.

I belive support for old PostScript fonts was removed for security concerns, but old TrueType fonts still work, for now.

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Chicago Magazine has a very intriguing and well researched online article about Apple’s abandonment of the Chicago font:

The biggest problem is that Chicago is a major heavyweight font, and a bitmapped heavyweight.

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