“I may steal that…you may see that again.”—Matthew Carter, in reference to a glyph design in 1403 Vintage Mono Pro.
Overview
1403 Vintage Mono Limited was inspired by the IBM 1403 mainframe line printer. The idea to create it was sparked by Mark VandeWettering wondering aloud if a font existed reminiscent of that printer. Limited includes the original 52 characters making up the A and H chains, along with the basic complement of Latin characters. Small capital forms are included to act as lowercase.
For many more characters, along with support of most languages using the Latin alphabet (including Vietnamese), Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew, take a look at the Pro version, 1403 Vintage Mono Pro.
History
During the creation of the 1403 Vintage Mono typefaces, a few blog posts were written about the history and progress of designing the typeface. At TypeCon 2013, Jeff Kellem gave a well-received presentation on Resurrecting Type of the IBM 1403 and heard nice compliments about the 1403 typeface during the conference and the TypeCrit critique session. He was also invited to talk about it at Hackers Conference 29, November 2013.
The 1401 Demo Lab Exhibit
On Wednesday, 20 November 2013, the Computer History Museum (@ComputerHistory) in Mountain View, California, USA opened The 1401 Demo Lab exhibit with two working, restored IBM 1401 mainframes, 1403 printers, card punches & sorters, tape libraries, and related equipment (see the restoration team's progress status updates and a nice post on the restoration by project lead Robert Garner). Weekly demonstrations happen on Wednesdays at 3pm PT and Saturdays at 11am PT. Another great exhibit to visit at the museum! See the printer that inspired this typeface!
OpenType Features
For extensive OpenType feature support, see the Pro version: 1403 Vintage Mono Pro.
1403 Vintage Mono Limited has a few OpenType features: ordinals, superscripts 1 2 3, and pre-built fractions ¼, ½, ¾.
Character Sets & Glyphs
1403 Vintage Mono Limited supports the Unicode Latin-1 block and the Adobe Latin 2 character set. Though fi and fl ligatures as an OpenType feature are not included, as they don't make sense in an all-caps monospace font, the glyphs are included for text encoded with those characters.
For many more characters, along with support of most languages using the Latin alphabet (including Vietnamese), Cyrillic, Greek, and Hebrew, take a look at the Pro version, 1403 Vintage Mono Pro.
Languages
Over 75 languages are supported, including:
| Afar | Indonesian | Rhaeto-Romance (Romansch) |
| Albanian | Interlingua | Rundi |
| Aragonese | Interlingue | Sango |
| Aymara | Italian | Sardinian |
| Basque | Javanese | Scots Gaelic |
| Bislama | Kinyarwanda | Shona |
| Breton | Kuanyama / Kwanyama | Somali |
| Chamorro | Kwambi | Sotho, Southern |
| Corsican | Limburgan / Limburger / Limburgish | South Sami |
| Danish | Low Saxon | Spanish |
| Dutch | Lule Sami | Sundanese |
| English | Luxembourgish (Letzeburgesch) | Swahili |
| Estonian | Malagasy | Swati |
| Faroese | Malay | Swedish |
| Fijian | Manx Gaelic | Tagalog |
| Filipino | Ndebele, South | Tsonga |
| Finnish | Ndonga | Tswana |
| French | Northern Sotho | Uzbek |
| Frisian | Norwegian (Bokmal) | Volapuk |
| Friulian | Norwegian Bokmal | Votic |
| Galician | Norwegian Nynorsk | Walloon |
| German | Occitan | Xhosa |
| Haitian / Haitian Creole | Oromo or Galla | Yapese |
| Hiri Motu | Papiamento in Aruba | Zhuang / Chuang |
| Icelandic | Papiamento in Netherlands Antilles | Zulu |
| Ido | Portuguese |
A specimen PDF for 1403 Vintage Mono Limited is in-progress. In the meanwhile, check out the 1403 Vintage Mono Pro interactive specimen site designed with Kenneth Ormandy:
Font in Use
- Trevor Brymer’s 6EQUJ5 Film
- Book cover of Talk Nerdy to Me: Grantland’s Guide to the Advanced Analytics Revolution
Let us know if you use our typefaces in your projects.
Trevor Brymer’s 6EQUJ5 Film
A custom subset was designed to recreate the 1977 SETI Wow! signal printout from an IBM 1403 mainframe line printer (all CGI) in Trevor Brymer’s short film 6EQUJ5 [IMDb], released in 2016. “A tale of love, loss, and signals from outer space.” Here’s a sample image from the film, courtesy of Trevor Brymer.
Along with a closeup before full integration into the shot:
The custom font was also used for title cards throughout the film. Samples are shown in this clip:
And, on the film’s poster:
Client: Trevor Brymer, “6EQUJ5” film
Designer: Jeff Kellem, Slanted Hall
Book Cover: Talk Nerdy to Me: Grantland's Guide to the Advanced Analytics Revolution
Jason Oberg (@ExtraBlase) used the 1403 Vintage Mono typeface in the book cover design for Talk Nerdy to Me: Grantland's Guide to the Advanced Analytics Revolution (2014). The book was included in the 2014 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (@SloanSportsConf) attendee gift bag. You can buy the sports analytics compilation from Grantland (@Grantland33). Read our blog post about it.
Photo credit: Jason Oberg
Client/Book Cover Designer: Jason Oberg
Book: Talk Nerdy to Me: Grantland’s Guide to the Advanced Analytics Revolution
Typeface Designer: Jeff Kellem, Slanted Hall
Let us know if you use our typefaces in your projects.