A Font for the ASR-33 TeleType Character Set

The emulator for the ICL2903 Educational System’s interactive BASIC environment reproduces the look and feel of an ASR33 TeleType with a UK print head so that it can display text that looks like this:

NSP 2903 BASIC SYSTEM
15/11/77 TIME 17:06
NENE COLLEGE COMPUTER CENTRE
READY

10 PRINT 5*5
99 END
RUN
25

LINE 99 DONE

To do this, I created a TrueType font by taking macro photos of some old faded TeleType listings from the era. From a number of images like this:

A fragment of TeleType listing

glyphs for all 64 characters in the set were extracted and used to generate a font representing our school’s TeleType. Notice that:

  • There are no lower case letters

  • Being a UK print head and keyboard, the l sign was printable but the $ sign was not. However, I’ve added a $ sign because the ICL 2903 character set included both.

  • The back-arrow character, _, is printed by the RUBOUT key to indicate that the previous character has been deleted.

Letters

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

Digits

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Special Characters

:

;

<

=

>

?

!

#

l

%

&

'

(

)

*

+

,

-

.

/

@

[

$

]

^

"

_