TL:DR; Font size should be 20+ pt on mobile devices.
> "If it's smaller than the 80-column text screen on an Apple IIe it's too small".
> Could somebody suggest a better way to talk to the next generation too young to remember the Apple II? I'm not sure the best way to describe the text size on an Apple II.
You are not alone with text being too bloody small on mobile devices. You'll want to discuss this with reference to font point size for readability. This means you'll probably also need to get into physical device measurements and dpi.
For example, measuring my Apple //e monitor I see it is 11" x 7.5". The actual displayable area is 9"x7". This gives these metrics:
* horz 9" / 560 px = 0.01607 inch/px (or 62.22 dpi)
* vert 7" / 192 px = 0.03645 inch/px (or 27.43 dpi)
Now that laughably "Low Res" compared to today's retina displays of 400+ dpi but it is a useful metric for when a font size becomes too small. On a 80x24 text screen each glyph is 7x8 px. This corresponds to these physical dimensions:
* 7px * 0.01607 inch/px = 0.1125 inch
* 8px * 0.03645 inch/px = 0.2916 inch
Converting that back into point size:
* 0.1125 * 72 = 8 point
* 0.2916 * 72 = 21 point
Thus anything less then ~21 point size on a phone will start to run into readability issues.
I designed the world's smallest font with 2x2 pixels for lowercase.
https://github.com/Michaelangel007/nanofont3x4
For that project I also made a 640x1136 px image with this nanofont font to match the native resolution 1:1 on my iPhone 5 to see how unreadable it was. Turns out it was readable (barely) but this was when your face was on top of the phone.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Michaelangel007/nanofont3x4/master/pic/output_bold_sources_ken.png
I haven't updated this for the new iPhones but I probably should as then you could link to it and say "See, THIS is too small."
> The context is something like talking about say the text in the Battletech game from Harebrained Schemes / Paradox Interactive, or how a web page is rendered on my phone and being annoyed at how small the "Mobile friendly" version appears, especially if I try to zoom and the site forces me to use horizontal scrolling.
The worst is these stupid "mobile" versions that don't let you shrink or expand the web page when you pinch / unpinch! On desktop we can use Ctrl+MouseWheel to zoom a browser scaling which works great. This same functionality isn't always available on mobile devices which further exacerbates the problem.
> We had Word Wrap on the Apple II+ with DogPaw and numerous other programs for god's sake, why can't a phone with a processor 40 years more advanced do simple word wrap?
Because that would take "work". /s
Seriously, programmers and designers have gotten extremely lazy. Make the computer easier to use for people? Nah, designers would rather fuck around with the UI, flat shading everything so you can no longer tell what is clickable, and what isn't, and CONSTANTLY change the UI trying to justify their jobs. It truly sucks.
Hell even an Apple ][ is more responsive then todays machines.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computers-struggle-match-input-latency-apple-iie
Michael