BIOS Tube Map

Personal project

The idea for this project is simple, recreating the London Tube Map using box drawing characters and the 16 colour VGA palette. I’m fascinated by the old BIOS programmes of the ’80s; how using only code page 437 such complex and usable interactive documents were created, and how they were all ‘typed’. Purely typgraphic documents with rules, borders, colours and pop-ups is something we simply don’t see these days with better hardware and software.

I wanted to see what could be created beyond a computer program using only a limited range of characters and colours. To match the ’80s aesthetic I’ve only used the original 16 colour VGA palette, more versatile than CGA or EGA but still with plenty of limitations.

A ubiquitous and yet complex diagram, the London Tube Map seemed ideal as the example document. The route lines lent themselves perfectly to the box characters and the variety of circles and bracket characters worked well as stations. Shaded areas marking the travel zones were easily included with the checkerboard characters.

The main break from authenticity is the choice of typeface. To give a better match to the actual map I would need a wheelchair character (and one each for dock and airport), not something included in the original IBM, and its competitor’s, fonts. Luckily, the free license DejaVu fonts (based on the Vera fonts) contain these extra characters and more. The more modern, less bitmap-like style makes the BIOS Map much easier to read, especially from a distance.

The map can be viewed as a PDF here.