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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 can pretty well count me to be in that group... except when the letters are shaped so badly that I just can't believe that the designer was not drunk, or stoned, or perhaps even Michael Jackson.

Why are fonts so hard? Why can't they just... you know... look right?

I hear all these scary sounding terms, like "kerning" and "hinting". I hear about how "hard" font design is. And I wonder why we can't just solve this problem and move on.

I guess it depends upon whether one considers fonts to be functional and utilitarian or works of art. Except for special purpose fonts like Zapf Chancery, I tend to think of them as purely functional. Give me one good sans font, and a good and simple mono font, and I'm happy. When I check out the fonts in, say, Firefox, I'm always amazed that out of a zillion fonts, a zillion minus one seem completely unusable, leaving exactly one that's pretty good.

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).