8x19 Text Mode Font Origins

Summary

I was recently made aware of something that I had noticed before, but never paid much attention to. Consider this screenshot of a BIOS POST screen: Intel AN430TX board POST screen VGA text modes usually use 720×400 resolution and 8×16 fonts (expanded to 9×16). The above screenshot uses 640×480 resolution (VGA graphics), but it is with a high degree a certainty a text mode, using a custom 8×19 font. The BIOS is a Phoenix BIOS 4.0 Release 6.0, running on an Intel Anchorage (AN430TX) board. For the sake of clarity: The screenshot was taken by digitizing the analog VGA output of a physical AN430TX board with an integrated ATI Rage 3D graphics chip. The VGA connector was plugged into a Lantronix Spider KVM, which was used to save the screenshot. It is not a screenshot of an emulated system. Some of the earliest examples of boards with an 8×19 font were reportedly Intel Anchorage AN430TX (see above) and Intel Atlanta AL430LX (one of the first AGP-capable boards), both released in 1997. These were probably the first boards using Phoenix BIOS after Intel had been using AMI BIOS for several years, a fact which may or may not be relevant. The OS/2 Museum happens to own both the AL440LX and AN430TX boards. And as the screenshot above indicates, the AN430TX certainly used an 8×19 font, at least in the final (P10) BIOS update. For reference, here’s what the first BIOS setup screen looks like: Intel AN430TX BIOS setup The obvious question is, when did this font show up? The P10 BIOS is from September 10, 1998. I have older BIOS versions, the oldest being update P06 from August 26, 1997. Is the 8×19 font there? Decoding Phoenix BIOS That seemingly simple question led to a bit of an adventure. There are tools for decoding Phoenix BIOS images (such as phnxdeco). But phnxdeco has no idea what to do with the Intel flash update files, which are split into several chunks. For the AN430TX, which uses a 2Mbit (256KB) flash, there’s a roughly 64K file called .BIO, another called .BI1, .BI2...