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We used to have green screens (sometimes orange) and were happy that the letters were readable. Didn't think about it very much, really. Then came "paper white".

Then came Windows 3.1... and my customers' employees started complaining about "not liking that font" and I had to change them for them. Now fonts are a business sector, and a topic all unto themselves.

I assert (in no particular order) that if we'd never left green screens, productivity would be higher, the world GDP would be greater, we wouldn't be in this recession, and I would likely be happier. :-)

Edited 2009-09-04 00:39 UTC

Fonts have been a business sector long before computers became the primary tool for designers. In fact, many people consider the shift to computers to be the downfall of typography, because of how simple it is to bang out a font, most foundries nowadays are just sweatshops going for quantity rather then quality.

Win 3.1 shipped with arial (it is now the de-facto sans font) which was actually just a re branded sonoran sans, which was one of the second generation IBM fonts. Your story probably has more to do with familiarity with the font rendering engine on windows more then the actual type.

The weird thing about typography is that the people who are into it are REALLY into it, and the rest of the world just thinks we are a bunch of lunatics for caring so much about how letters are shaped.

You might be exaggerating, but I often think that text-based terminals provided for better applications in the (boring) business environment. This can be attributed to nostalgia, but since I didn't live in those days (I may have used DOS, and I may be a unix sysadmin now, but I never worked in the mainframe+terminal days), I guess this is hardly the case.

But lets see why:

1. Programmers (especially in the business environment) tend to suck at designing user interfaces (may they be fat or web clients) and waste too much time on it when they could be improving the logic;

2. A more limited UI (limited for the users and limited for the programmers) would force a focus on the automation instead of overloading the user (and this happens on graphical UIs both because of the programmers _and_ the users - which keep asking for more and more "knobs" until the final product eats more user brain cycles than the work it was supposed to simplify);

3. UIs would be more consistent and more easier to grasp for users (which seem to be less confused by text fields than innumerable graphical widgets and navigation styles). Additionally, business apps mostly have awful interfaces and are utterly confusing and inconsistent at best. See 1. and 2.

Of course, I'm talking about business apps here, where functionality is the important part. In the consumer space, this would be completely unfeasible (and stupid).