"Corning used borosilicate to produce all Pyrex products. However, the company that purchased the cookware products switched to soda-lime glass, adopting the name pyrex (spelled with all lowercase letters).
Corning continued to make its lab tools with borosilicate, dubbing these products to be PYREX (spelled with all uppercase letters)."
All of the glass examples in TFA are borosilicate all-caps PYREX, while most of what you can buy today in the store is lowercase pyrex (Europe is an exception where the all-caps variety can be found).
0: https://www.corning.com/worldwide/en/products/life-sciences/...
- https://pyrex.co.uk/pages/a-unique-glass
It is a source of some annoyance that lowercase pyrex infects the market via imports.
As an informed human being who happens to buy things from time to time you should definitely know the difference though.
Does anyone know which fonts (or, probably more importantly, which modern-day equivalents) are used to get this feeling?
I enjoy using it for reading and writing code.
Things working against that are:
- % is wrong. That really looks like a different typeface all together. Not unheard of, might be worth seeing if it matches any other monotype fonts.
- Bolded headings have some differences. Rockwell Extra Bold should still have circular tittles, but unless it's a scanning artifact, the few lowercase "i" examples I can find in those headings seem to be square.
- The Rockwell favour in the tables is tweaked, with no descenders and uses tabular digits. This is pretty common, but the digital copies of Rockwell I have laying around don't have those exact forms... doesn't really say much when we're talking about what specific hot-metal type casts did monotype sell them 90-odd years ago.
---
On the title pages (like page 13), my best guess is Memphis. [1] The R is wrong for Rockwell, but also the lower a in "Brand" is totally wrong for Memphis, and the quote is totally different. Going to take lunch, and possibly come back to this in a bit because now I'm intrigued haha.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_(typeface) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis_(typeface)
That does mention that Linotype had a Memphis flavour with a two-storey "a" though... so maaaaaybe it is Memphis! Most likely their Rockwell typeface was also supplied from Linotype in that case, probably under a different name.
https://archive.org/details/stanley-catalogue-34-1929/page/6...
You don’t know what you have untill you lose it.
To me, they all look like valid beer vessels.
Today these are like $300 at least, and I'm guessing they cannot be made in the USA. (I would be glad to be wrong)
edit: ok with inflation from 1938 it's not so incomparable. But still.
bayindirh•2h ago
I believe it's interesting that these kinds of intricate, hand made objects float to the front page of the HN while at the same time many people glorify how AI can handle these jobs and can do an "arguably better job" in less time.
It's evident that these hand-drawn diagrams or any artifact with high levels of human effort (for lack of a better term) contains something we lost in today's world.
Maybe we should reflect upon that, a bit.
tokai•1h ago
amonroe805-2•1h ago
Whether or not you personally would make this cost/quality tradeoff comes down to the individual, but to me it is also quite clear that something was lost in the transition.
data-ottawa•51m ago
Google Shopping is an example. It has enforced opinions about what a product looks like, so you have to force a square peg through a round hole.
They’ve got a lot of stuff about pricing and loyalty and quantities, but if you dig into tons of categories they have almost nothing that represents the real categories sellers and buyers care about.
Look at the collectibles category. If you sell Pokémon cards and collectibles there is zero merchandising info that actually matches your products or how they’re sold.
That means your analytics, automatic listings, ads, etc. are too generic for your customers. All your automated stuff is going to come through wrong.
Meanwhile niche and deep sellers who avoid that forced genericisation, like McMaster-Carr[1] can have these incredibly valuable, useful, and compelling catalogs.
I’d say that deep user knowledge is why Aperture had such a strong fan base too.
I struggle with this buying from Lee Valley. Their caralogs are fantastic, but I have trouble finding things on their website.
This turned into a rant, but maybe a TL;DR is a lot of modern software has no skin in the game of specialization, and so they inadvertently limit these experiences.
[1] mcmaster.com
cnity•58m ago
Extend this metaphor however you please.
91bananas•51m ago
We should definitely reflect on that a lot.
srmatto•29m ago
I also don't think its gone. We still have great illustrators but someone somewhere has to decide to use illustrations instead of a photo, CGI, or something else and then they have to pay the premium for that service.