Comments on: How are the Apple 1 and Wonder Woman Comics alike

By: More Apple 1 Fonts « Mike's Hobby Blog

More Apple 1 Fonts « Mike's Hobby Blog — Wed, 22 May 2013 00:30:36 +0000

[…] a previous post, I talked about how the lettering on the Apple 1 was probably done with a K&E Leroy system. […]

By: Dean Claxton

Dean Claxton — Wed, 22 May 2013 00:23:38 +0000

Correction to my previous post – the “1” with the hat is also used for J1 label and also the video and power connector pin 1.

I think most of the other ones are substituted for “I” – there may be some other exceptions on labels that cant be seen (under the large caps for example).

By: Dean Claxton

Dean Claxton — Tue, 21 May 2013 23:44:53 +0000

I believe that it may have been my email that sparked this research. The K&E Leroy machine was very widely used in this period when boards were hand taped.

If you look at the Q1 label on the Apple 1 board, we see that the number 1 has the “hat” on it whereas every other “1” on the board was substituted for a “I”.

Also the crossed zero’s on the ram 0 location – I believe that these may even be the diameter symbol used in engineering drafting, though could also have been manually crossed.

I found a very close truetype font called Planscribe which is based on the Leroy font, though the “1” does not have the “hat”.

As for the font used on the copper layer – particularly the Apple 1 text – this is very likely to be letraset.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:05:39 +0000

Hi Lionel,

The larger characters on the Apple 1 are not Leroy, but I’m convinced the smaller stuff is. Transfer letters would have crisper ends, without the rounded characteristic of the end of a pen drawn line. Stay tuned for more posts on my investigations into the larger lettering.

By: Lionel Theunissen

Lionel Theunissen — Mon, 13 May 2013 00:27:52 +0000

I don’t know what research you have done into this, but I don’t think the similarity in appearance alone is conclusive to the Apple 1 overlay text being produced on a Leroy system. The Apple 1 appears to use the Helvetica font (or at least a close variant). The shape of the numbers 1, 2, and 7 in particular is distinctive and characteristic of Helvetica (although some of the 1’s on the Apple 1 seem to differ to standard Helvetica, that might be explained by using an ‘I’ instead of a true ‘1’). I think the most that can be said is that the font used on the Leroy is at least very similar if not the same and that it is probably a Helvetica variant, which is not surprising as it was and still is a very popular printing font.

Another possibility is that Letraset dry-transfers were used for the overlay text. Looking at the photo in your blog I would almost bet money that the Scelbi front bezel text was produced using Letraset.