Commodore's character thickness

When I talk about the thickness of the characters, I mean the thickness of the vertical lines, because due to the way images were displayed on monitors and televisions in those days (CRT), horizontal lines even with a thickness of 1 pixel were always well displayed.

    When Commodore launched PET office computers in 1977, the characters projected for them were 1 pixel thick. They presented themselves with class and looked good on the monochrome monitors dedicated to them, even at 80 characters per line.

 

These characters worked so well that even the VIC-20 personal computer was given the same characters.

 

On the other hand, the next Commodore 64 computer from 1982 already had an altered font with a thickness of 2 pixels.

There is a belief that Commodore, by introducing such characters, "stole" them from Atari, which in 1979 presented 8-bit machines 400/800 series, and they had characters of this thickness.

This can be evidenced by the lowercase letters, which are identical to Atari's, and the considerable similarity of uppercase letters and other characters.

I don't know how it was in reality, but I decided to do an experiment of some kind, based on comments and suggestions from Facebook users in the Commodore 64/128 . I put together the small letters of the Atari 400/800, Commodore 64 and VIC-20, then decided according to simple rules to widen the characters from the VIC-20 so that they also have a thickness of 2 pixels.

The results are surprising, as most of the letters are the same. Perhaps the development of new thicker characters at Commodore was similar. A few characters  still didn't look right, so adjustments were made, perhaps taking slight inspiration from characters they had already seen from competitors. Commodore had a different idea for the characters, however, as the capital letters are based on a 6x7 pixel raster (6 pixels wide x 7 pixels high), while at Atari they are based on 6x6 pixels.

Now the big question is, why couldn't the characters from the VIC-20 have been left in place, but introduced new ones? When I considered this problem, I checked the number of displayed characters per line by the PET, the VIC-20 and the C64. The Commodore PET on monochrome screens had no problems with the quality of the displayed characters per line. Commodore VIC-20 was already displaying characters in colour, but there were only 22 characters per line, so even on TVs connected via an RF modulator this was not a problem, and the characters were readable. The Commodore 64 was already going to display 40 colour characters per line, even on poor TV sets, so the characters had to be fatter to be readable.

My additional experiment shows why, although carried out under quite good conditions, as my C128 no longer has an RF modulator, and the TV is from the 1990s, but nevertheless, you can see why.

One can guess that other companies introducing 2 pixel thick characters have had similar problems with thinner characters.

Characters displayed via S-Video, even with a thickness of 1 pixel are clearly, but already characters with a thickness of 1 pixel via Composite Video become unreadable, with an RF modulator on old TVs it would be even worse. Under these conditions, a thickness of 2 pixels improves the readability of the characters.

Now you can reflect and answer the question for yourselves: did Commodore have to steal characters from Atari?

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On one of the English-language groups about Commodore, I received this information (relevant excerpt):

Re the actual content of the blog post: This has been discussed in Commodore International Historical Society where IIRC it was stated that MOS Technology (the semiconductor manufacturer that Commodore bought in 1975) actually (probably?) made the lower case font for Atari and thus it was always Commodores property. I might misremember the details of this though.

In the 1970's MOS made a lot of ROMs for Atari. (On the other hand, later on in the 1980's MOS production was filled with making the custom chips for the Commodore computers so that Commodore even bought ROMs for the C64 productions from at least General Instruments, and possibly other companies too).

Also, more importantly copyright laws doesn't apply to bit mapped fonts in USA. I'm not sure what the copyright laws say in other countries and I doubt that anyone would had been keen on started a legal case.