Because of a Trappist monk, Apple computer displays look the way they do today.
The monk was the Rev Robert Palladino, who died at the end of February.
A Roman Catholic priest who began his vocation in a monastic order, Father Palladino was also a world-renowned master of calligraphy.
“Priest and calligrapher,” his business card read, in his unimpeachable Renaissance italic, and he long plied both trades at once. For years, babies he baptised received baptismal certificates in his flawless hand.
As a Trappist brother, Father Palladino learned his art in silence, honed it over years of study and eventually, on leaving his order, taught it to others, The Times of India reported.
To his students, he brought a world of genteel scholarship and quiet contemplation; a world whose modus operandi — by hand, with ink, on paper, parchment and vellum — was little changed for centuries; a world of classical music (an accomplished singer, he liked to ply his calligraphy to Beethoven), Gregorian chant and the Latin Mass, which he continued celebrating in discreet defiance long after Vatican II.
An authority on the history, structure and aesthetics of scripts from antiquity to the present, Father Palladino taught calligraphy at Reed College in Portland, Ore, from 1969 until his retirement, in 1984.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs briefly attended Reed in 1972 before dropping out for economic reasons, but hung around campus for more than a year afterward; during that time, he audited Father Palladino’s class. After helping to found Apple in 1976, he often credited the company’s elegant onscreen fonts — and his larger interest in the design of computers as physical objects — to what he had been taught there.
“I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great,” Jobs said in a 2005 commencement address at Stanford.
He continued: “Ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”