[2] In the 1960s, Leo Maggs was working at the Hazell Sun Group's design studio in Covent Garden, London.

Maggs based the letters of that title on the MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) system, E-13B, used on bank cheques.

He then continued to design the rest of the letters of the alphabet in his spare time, basing their proportions on that of the Gill Sans typeface.

[3] The MICR E-13B font was designed for automated reading by a very simple magnetic reader in the early days of automatic character recognition.

Other contemporary typefaces based on E-13B include Moore Computer (recognisable by its dots underneath the letters M and N), Gemini, Orbit-B, and Countdown.