New lore on “New Topaz” has dropped, i. e. the modernized sans-serif system font used in AmigaOS 2.0 and later.

Peter Cherna at VCF East 2025

During the “Inside Commodore Amiga’s History” discussion panel at VCF East 2025, ex-Commodore software engineer Peter Cherna talked a bit about the overall new look introduced in 2.0 (still called 1.4 when he started), and the new Topaz font in particular:

There was an agreement that we were going to have a sans-serif font – we still had the old Topaz in there – and then Kodiak Burns in California kind of forced the issue and picked a slightly ugly sans-serif font.

…

We found a font floating around on the not-internet at the time that was derived from Topaz. Basically, it was Topaz with all the serifs removed.

That’s how the weird 1.4 version that can be found in Kickstart 1.4 Alpha 18 came to be. Bob “Kodiak” Burns is the creator of the original Topaz fonts.

So I went and cleaned it all up and fixed a bunch of the letters and the lowercase “L” to make it not look like a vertical bar, and “I” has a little curl at the bottom. That was very contentious, a lot of people thought that it was wrong. I was very insistent because I wanted it to be distinctive for legibility.

Turns out it’s a big contribution to the personality of the new font as well.

Indeed! I remember being really excited of the modern new 2.0 look when I was a teenager, and New Topaz had a big part in that, with the new Amigas feeling way more professional and all. I loved working with New Topaz so much I even destested the old, “ugly” variant a bit – but not anymore! :)

The font that was “floating around” probably was a variant of clean.font. All the specimen I’ve seen on textfiles.com indeed have a vertical bar for the lowercase L.

Here’s a screenshot of Workbench 1.4 Alpha 15 running on Kickstart 1.4 Alpha 18. This seems to be an inbetween snapshot: The lowercase L already has its little curl, but the lowercase I hasn’t, and a lot of letters still look wonky.

Topaz in Kickstart 1.4 Alpha 18

Topaz 9 variant in the boot screen

Anyhow, don’t forget to watch the whole panel on Amiga Bill’s channel. They even have an original Amiga breadboard prototype on stage!