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Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| Bitstream Inc. | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Public |
| Nasdaq: BITS | |
| Industry | Type foundry, mobile phone web browsers |
| Founded | 1981 |
| Founder | Cherie Cone Matthew Carter Mike Parker  |
| Defunct | March 19, 2012 |
| Fate | Acquired by Monotype |
| Headquarters | Marlborough, Massachusetts, United States |
| Key people | Amos Kaminski (chairman and Interim CEO) |
Number of employees | 96[1] |
Bitstream Inc. was an American type foundry that produced digital typefaces. It was founded in 1981 by Matthew Carter, Mike Parker, Cherie Cone, and Rob Friedman, all former employees of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company.[2] It was located in Marlborough, Massachusetts. The font business, including MyFonts, was acquired by Monotype Imaging in March 2012.[3][4] The remainder of the business, responsible for Pageflex and Bolt Browser, was spun off to a new entity named Marlborough Software Development Holdings Inc.[5][6] It was later renamed Pageflex, Inc following a successful management buyout in December 2013.[7]
Bitstream created a library of "classic" digital fonts, usually under different names, initially drawing from the Linotype library.[8] For example, Times Ten was released as Dutch 801, Bembo as Aldine 401, Eurostile as Square 721, Frutiger as Humanist 777, Gill Sans as Humanist 521, and Univers as Zurich. In the United States, while the names of typefaces can be trademarked, the typefaces themselves are not copyrightable, allowing anyone to digitize existing fonts and redistribute them under a new name.[9][10][11] While a success, Bitstream received criticism for its strategy of cheaply offering digitizations of pre-existing typefaces that it had not designed, with font designer John Hudson saying that "the development of the original Bitstream library was one of the worst instances of piracy in the history of type."[8] The company distributed fonts with metrics matching PostScript fonts, making it possible for output from software clones of PostScript to match the original.[10] The Bitstream font collection became widely used through its inclusion with the CorelDRAW software, as well as other Corel products such as WordPerfect.
Bitstream also developed a number of original fonts, such as Amerigo, by Gerard Unger Charter, by Matthew Carter, Carmina by Gudrun Zapf, Chianti by Dennis Pasternak, Iowan Old Style by John Downer, Arrus by Richard Lipton and the open source Bitstream Vera family of fonts.
One of their best known fonts is Swiss 721 BT, which is a Helvetica variant with condensed versions and a rounded version. It was among the first digitally available Swiss family typefaces, being designed for that purpose in 1982.
Another Bitstream product is Font Fusion, a font rasterizing engine developed jointly with Type Solutions, Inc., which was later owned entirely by Bitstream.[12]
The[which?] multi-byte character set was named Bitstream International Character Set (BICS).
The company had a high level of involvement in BeOS, with older BeOS releases using a Bitstream renderer, and the latest development releases from 2001 using Font Fusion. The OS, including its freeware releases, included a large number of Bitstream fonts, including their versions of Times New Roman, Helvetica and Courier.
On December 2, 1998, Bitstream Inc. announced acquisition of all outstanding stock of Type Solutions, Inc. In addition, Sampo Kaasila, its founder and president and the creator of TrueType, agreed to join Bitstream's team as Director of Research and Development.
In January 1999, Bitstream launched MyFonts, an open marketplace offering fonts from various foundries and a forum where users could interact with type experts.[13]
In January 2009, Bitstream introduced the BOLT Browser, a Java ME-based Web browser for mobile phones. It was distributed free of charge to consumers and was built using the company's ThunderHawk mobile Web browsing technology for mobile network operators and handset manufacturers. The product was discontinued by the end of 2011.[14]
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Bitstream Inc. was an American type foundry that produced digital typefaces. It was founded in 1981 by Matthew Carter, Mike Parker, Cherie Cone, and Rob Friedman, all former employees of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. It was located in Marlborough, Massachusetts. The font business, including MyFonts, was acquired by Monotype Imaging in March 2012. The remainder of the business, responsible for Pageflex and Bolt Browser, was spun off to a new entity named Marlborough Software Development Holdings Inc. It was later renamed Pageflex, Inc following a successful management buyout in December 2013.
Vera is a digital typeface (computer font) superfamily with a liberal license. It was designed by Jim Lyles from the now-defunct Bitstream Inc. type foundry, and it is closely based on Bitstream Prima, for which Lyles was also responsible. It is a TrueType font with full hinting instructions, which improve its rendering quality on low-resolution devices such as computer monitors. The font has also been repackaged as a Type 1 PostScript font, called Bera, for LaTeX users. Vera consists of serif, sans-serif, and monospace fonts. The Bitstream Vera Sans Mono typeface in particular is suitable for technical work, as it clearly distinguishes "l" (lowercase L) from "1" (one) and "I" (uppercase i), and "0" (zero) from "O" (uppercase o), in similar fashion as Verdana and Tahoma fonts. Bitstream Vera Sans is also the default font used by the Python library Matplotlib to produce plots.
Bitstream Cyberbit is a commercial serif Unicode font designed by Bitstream Inc. It is freeware for non-commercial uses. It was one of the first widely available fonts to support a large portion of the Unicode repertoire. Cyberbit was developed by Bitstream to provide Unicode Consortium members with a large Unicode-encoded font to use for testing and development purposes. The font has 32,910 characters (29,934 glyphs) and 935 kerning pairs in v2.0 beta. The related Bitstream Cyberbase font includes a much smaller number of characters, with 1,249 glyphs and 935 kerning pairs in v1.0 beta. Bitstream no longer offers Cyberbit as a free download or retail product.
Bitstream Charter is a serif typeface designed by Matthew Carter in 1987 for Bitstream Inc. Charter is based on Pierre-Simon Fournier’s characters, originating from the 18th century. Classified by Bitstream as a transitional-serif typeface (Bitstream Transitional 801), it also has features of a slab-serif typeface and is often classified as such. Charter was originally optimized for printing on the low-resolution 300 dpi laser printers of the 1980s, and remains suitable for printing on both modern high-resolution laser printers and inexpensive lower resolution inkjet printers due to its strong, legible design. Its structure was optimised for low-memory computers and printers. In a 2013 interview, Carter explained that it used "a very simplified structure and a minimum number of curves, more straight-line segments... very economical compared to, say, Times New Roman," but noted that rapid development of printers made this unnecessary even before he had finished the design. In its simplification of serif forms, it foreshadowed Carter's later landmark design, Georgia for Microsoft. In 1992 Bitstream donated a version of Charter, along with its version of Courier, to the X Consortium under terms that allowed the font to be modified and redistributed. This has resulted in open source derivatives of Bitstream Charter, including Charis SIL. Typographer Matthew Butterick considers Bitstream Charter to be one of the best free fonts available. Because of its popularity, a new Charter Pro release of the typeface was released in 2004, with an expanded character set including additional symbols, ranging figures (old-style) and small capitals. This version was later added as a system font on OS X 10.13 High Sierra. Carter was later asked by Monotype to consider releasing a sans-serif companion to Charter. Finding his attempts unsatisfying, he scrapped the idea for a more radical, less directly complementary design, Carter Sans.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.