You can get nicer 5x5 fonts amd it was not that uncommon back in the day. 4 wide is not too bad if you make the center of M and W just two pixels inset from top or bottom respectively or borrow the spacing column.
Plenty of systems did it like CP/M on the Spectrum +3 and it looks pretty decent.
I remember when these first started appearing in Windows was around the time toolbars became popular.
I think the idea was the most common ones had icons which matched the toolbar button so you could start with the slower-but-more-comprehensive menus and then notice the quicker toolbar equivalent through their matching icons.
If you use LINQ and have ever used areay Contains youre about to find out it's not going to be smooth. They knew about this for a year but decided coercing to span in an expression tree despite it being invalid wasn't worth fixing.
I wrote a LINQ provider (.Net) for Elasticsearch. Was quite the challenge dealing with the sorts of quirks and subtle differences between the two. Case sensitivity and the tokenization are also hurdles to overcome but mapping Group by to Elastics aggregates was facets back then) was the toughest part.
Hats off to Coralogix for taking up the challenge in converting SQL.
https://youtu.be/rf5o5liZxnA?feature=shared&t=542 has a demonstration of NextStep 3 (released September 1992) that clearly shows a computer icon that Steve refers to as "My Computer" and then moves into hitting the "Network" icon globe that shows other computers on his local network.
"NeXTStep had its Dock, but that doesn't have menus or a status icon."
NeXTStep not only had menus but tear-off dockable menus/sub-menus that are superior to any menus we have in apps today. It's clearly present in the screenshot I linked to.
"The task bar, the Start menu, the system tray, "My Computer", "Network Neighbourhood", all that: all original, patented Microsoft designs. There was nothing like it before. "
Apart from, you know, NextStep which had a dock for system tray/start menu as well as my computer and network neighbourhood.
You can find screenshots of NextStep 3.3 showing this such as https://winworldpc.com/product/nextstep/3x from 1992 and it's possible they're also in earlier versions - NextStep 1.0 was released in 1989.
Cool, thanks! It took longer than I care to admit. They're redrawn on the fly and it also means the 2x and 3x options can render it without upscaling blur.
Most of the 8-bit machines had quite square pixels (Spectrum, Commodore 64) but machines with multiple resolutions often had modes that doubled the horizontal res (C128, PCW, BBC Mode 3) giving rectangular pixels and by the time the 16-bits hit (Amiga, Atari ST) these modes were commonly the default and square pixels were relegated to "low-res" modes which were used less often.
I thought about setting up my camera and pointing it at my Princeton 15" multisync CRT and scripting a live screenshot of every font but that seemed... overkill.
The process involves me creating a raw 768 byte "ch8" file for the Spectrum then running it through a bash script that creates the .psf and .bdf using psf2tools.
The next bash script uses a bunch of third-party tools and my own PixelWorld open-source .NET tool to generate all the other formats and disk images and then packages them up into a zip and uploads it to S3.
Plenty of systems did it like CP/M on the Spectrum +3 and it looks pretty decent.