Originally Posted by
vane171
The classic fork is splayed forward
Pretty much
all road bike forks, vintage and modern, have the front wheel axle offset forward of the steering axis. It's just visually subtler on modern forks because the tubing is a lot wider and they use straight lines rather than bending the blades.
Different eras have somewhat different fashions, but there's a
ton of geometric overlap between road bikes from today and road bikes from, say, 1980.
The thing that we're actually interested in is the front-center, which is the fore-aft distance from the bottom bracket shell to the front wheel axle. This depends on the geometry of the fork, but also on how the fork is situated within the frame (how far forward, and what angle the steering axis is at).