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The question is mostly about the fonts used in those screens. AFAIK, the images were slides superimposed with data generated by computers that was captured from CRTs by cameras and piped into the MOCR as analog video to be displayed in the slow-scan screens. Terminals such as the IBM 2250 and 2260 were used in the mid-to-late 60's, with vector and raster displays respectively, but I couldn't find information on them being used at NASA's mission control, even though there were multiple IBM 360's in operation there.

MOCR 2 during the Apollo 13 crisis

The image above show what seems like 24 lines of text, which would be expected from the early CRT terminals of the time.

Other images (below) however, show what appears to be a much higher text density:

Photo 2

Flight Director Console

None of these images show the characters with enough resolution to distinguish any typographic features, nor they show the text overlays used for labels. Having such close-ups or documentation would be extremely valuable from a historic point-of-view.

A different one, from another source (MIT Science Reporter — "Landing on the Moon" (1966), 26m06s into the film), shows clearly the artifacts of a high-refresh vector display (brighter points where the beam slows down, some irregularity due to analog response of beam deflection), but it's from earlier stages of the Apollo program and not from the MOCR:

Earlier Apollo close-up

rbanffy
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    this asks about bitmapped fonts but this question applies to even earlier technology, how cool! – uhoh Jan 24 '20 at 22:13
  • Indeed. Some close-up shots of Space Shuttle displays show what looks like vector graphics. It'd make some sense to draw those in long-persistence phosphor screens to be captured by cameras and piped to the slow-scan screens at the consoles.

    OTOH, vector displays offer freedom to position elements outside grids and I see a lot of character grids that only make sense on raster character displays.

     – rbanffy Jan 27 '20 at 18:53
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    There are tons of bitmaps in MAME ROMs (I've been digging through them for a Unicode extension proposal) but very few things go that far back in time. In those days, CRT terminals were the kind of thing one would expect to find only at NASA - most others had to make it work with teletypes. I started my own https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font from the x3270 bitmapped fonts. – rbanffy Jan 27 '20 at 19:06
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    @rbanffy in the early days the shuttle simulator instructor station used three physically different types of CRT displays - vector, raster, and onboard display repeaters. By the time I started working in the MCC it was all raster there (x windows). The simulator in later days was all raster too. – Organic Marble Jan 28 '20 at 13:09
  • @OrganicMarble looking at the available footage of the Apollo/early Shuttle era MOCR, I see some clues that indicate a mix of raster/character displays (the "TV guide", some text-only displays where borders line up with character cell limits) and vector (where text isn't aligned to character cells or where there are multiple character sizes on screen).

    BTW, working in the MCC is a killer line on any CV :;)

     – rbanffy Jan 28 '20 at 21:55
  • There is a mention in an Ars Technica article that some of the screens had fixed overlays with labels so that the computer would only need to draw the values (which makes more sense with vector displays) but the candidates I've seen are weirdly aligned with lines and columns. Reverse video, something that can be easily done in character displays (and rules out vector) is not seen anywhere. – rbanffy Jan 28 '20 at 21:55

2 Answers2

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The National Archives website has the stock footage for the NASA documentary "This is Mission Control". In the footage they show closeup shots of several screen in the MOCR and the staff support rooms. The footage is from October 1970, so it's probably safe to assume the screens show data for an Apollo 14 simulation run. Here are two examples from it.

Lunar Orbit Insertion Planning: https://i.imgur.com/THJBg90.png

CMC DSKY And State Buffer Monitor: enter image description here

Often they would just pan the camera along the rows of screens in the MOCR, so you can't decipher everything on the screens which is a bit unfortunate. But you can find more by looking through the footage on the NARA catalog website: https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=this%20is%20mission%20control&f.fileFormat=video%2Fmp4

indy91
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These are the best I've seen. They are from the recent restoration of the Apollo MOCR but are accurate AFAIK.

enter image description here

enter image description here

Source: https://wordpress.accuweather.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/mission-control-7.jpg

I ran across a document that might be of use. It's basically the handbook for creating MCC displays of that era. It contains a great deal of in-depth info and some sample displays.

enter image description here

enter image description here

The document is the Philco-Ford Display Formats Manual.

Organic Marble
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    I couldn't get information on the original sources for these slides from the company that made the restoration. There is an excellent photo gallery at the Are Technica website. – rbanffy Jan 24 '20 at 21:45
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    Nice addition. I could count 34 lines, but never would be able to figure out the 50 column width from the original images alone. – rbanffy Jul 11 '21 at 20:25
  • Also, I wonder if the row counts influenced later platforms: the "2, 3, 4, or 5 percent of display height" gives us 50, 33+, 25 and 20 lines, the first 3 went on to be quite popular in later computers and terminals. – rbanffy Jul 11 '21 at 20:30