History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often tiles

Following (or, preceding) the previous post… 1. Old computers loved 8×8 fonts and they also loved 8×8 graphics. Since for many of those computers the graphics were displayed side by side without any gaps, the fonts had to waste a precious pixel or two to create some breathing room between the characters. But there was a benefit to this arrangement – you could seamlessly combine two or more tiles into something bigger. You could see that already in built-in graphics for a late 1970s computer Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P: a lot of single-character graphics of houses, tanks, planes, and people – but also some that only made sense fused together, forming submarines, warships, or the U.S.S. Enterprise: A later computer called Atari ST had an Atari logo spread across two characters, and an easter egg – a 16×16 face of “Bob”. And Apple II’s character set allowed to combine a few glyphs into a running man, a folder, or a scrollbar: Arcade videogames did the same. Pac-Man’s maze was assembled…