I released Color Basic on July 18, 2012. It was a direct homage to the TRS-80 Color Computer (CoCo), the machine that first introduced me to programming and, eventually, to type design. My family got a CoCo in 1983, and I spent countless hours with it in my room, typing in BASIC games from magazines like Rainbow and Hot CoCo. The system font was burned into ROM and couldn’t be modified. It didn’t even have a lowercase set—instead, the lowercase was represented by inverted uppercase characters on a black background, which printed as proper lowercase. That quirk stuck with me, and I carried it into my recreation.

Technically, rebuilding the font was straightforward. The CoCo was so low resolution that I could simply count pixels from the screen to reconstruct each glyph. I kept the inverted caps functioning exactly as they had in the original. At the same time, I expanded the character set beyond what the CoCo offered. The original machine had very limited punctuation and no accented letters, so I added those and more, just enough to make it a usable font in contemporary settings.

I first released Color Basic with a free commercial-use desktop license. In November 2022, I placed it fully into the public domain under CC0. Since then, it has served mostly as a curiosity for retro-computing enthusiasts. The Color Computer Archive, a central hub for CoCo fans, uses it regularly. For me, creating Color Basic was both a tribute to the computer that shaped my early years and an effort to preserve a tiny but meaningful piece of home-computing history.