The article is an interesting history lesson, but that sub-heading at the top sort of threw me for a loop, referring to Microsoft as "the first big tech company"<p>Microsoft was, and still is, a giant tech company starting in the 90's and on. But if one looks at the digital corporate landscape back in the 1980s, IBM was an absolute <i>behemoth</i>. Consider this. In 1985, IBM had a market cap of $95 billion. That was more than the next 13 largest tech companies at the time, combined! This other group includes Apple, HP, Hitachi, Intel, Motorola, Sony, AT&T, Texas Instruments, Verizon, Xerox, National Semiconductor, DEC, and Control Data.<p>It's hard to overstate how powerful IBM was at its zenith.<p>I only know this because I was curious and looked up the data the other day, and it blew me away.
> The new fonts had to mimic the established core set of PostScript fonts, which included Times Roman and Helvetica. Since Monotype had originally developed the Times fonts back in the hot-metal days, that part was easy. To compete with Helvetica, though, they chose to adapt an earlier Monotype design with similar characteristics, called Arial.<p>I’m really annoyed at this particular substitution. Yes, I understand that Linotype was being annoying, but the choice of Arial as a Helvetica replacement just grinds my gears. It’s a Helvetica replacement, all right: one worse in literally every way. It’s all the bad parts of Helvetica with none of the good ones. Helvetica is precise with its terminals; it’s styled with its graceful flourishes on letters like the capital “R”. Arial has none of that charm. But it has all the downsides of Helvetica: it’s really wide; it’s not the best for readability. Helvetica really is a pretty font, but Arial is utterly awful.<p>I’m just so sad it ended up being given such a foundational place in digital typography. I subconsciously wince I see a default Google Doc, or when someone says to “just use Arial” when Helvetica isn’t available. I really wished they had gone with something completely different instead of using a bad-looking, copycat font.
I am always amazed by so much effort and so much research in something that is often taken as granted and not really appreciated to its true value by most users (me included).
I've been using the new Cascadia font that Windows released with their new terminal for a bit and I can say I enjoy it. It's playful.<p>I don't use color schemes and have a white background, so this typeface provides all the joy I need/want. I don't mean this as anything more than an opinion of course. It's a matter of taste.
Fantastic read, there is sufficient material for someone to author a sizable book covering the history of digital type in computing and how it came to be standardized. Digital type is such a critical part of our computing experience but so deep under the covers that is does not get any attention.
Reminds me of Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford, he attributes the explosion of fonts to his previous studies. The bit about connecting the dots looking backwards.
as a slight aside, i found this article very easy to read...<p>i appreciated the break-up every few paragraphs with a new heading and a picture or two<p>makes for a big contrast to "wall of text" articles that can get tiring after a pqge or so