visitors of a certain vintage will no doubt keep in mind the time when prince avoided his royal setting and ended up being an unpronounceable symbol. people had no choice but to refer to him as TAFKAP, The artist formerly understood As Prince, and members of the music press were sent a 3.5″ floppy disk with a font style file consisting of a single character — that gender-transcending shape that would soon become another one of Prince’s guitars. but it’s 2021, and now you can get it from the Internet Archive. fun fact: the file wasn’t ever locked down. In fact, the sign was available on Prince’s Compuserve and fan club CD-ROM.
While some people trawl auction sites for overalls and odd keyboards, others look for absurd products from the zeitgeist, like a copy of this floppy. Take [Anil Dash] for instance. [Anil] finally pulled the activate after 15 years of debating this specific purchase. [Anil]’s interest was reignited after reading this analysis of whether the sign could ever be put into Unicode. (Between being trademarked, a logo, and a personal character, it’s ineligible for inclusion.)
Earlier this week, [Anil] teamed up with Adafruit to extract the data from the floppy. The Twitter thread that ensued led visitors to another old source of the font style — the 1994 game prince Interactive. We question if they broke out the oscilloscope, though it doesn’t look like it.
Thanks for the tip, [pt and limor]!