
The Faces of Microsoft (2017) - beefhash
https://www.typemag.org/post/the-faces-of-microsoft
======
tech-historian
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"

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 _behemoth_. 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.

It's hard to overstate how powerful IBM was at its zenith.

I only know this because I was curious and looked up the data the other day,
and it blew me away.

~~~
harpratap
The word "tech" itself changes every decade or so. Agriculture was considered
"tech" at one point of time. The companies you listed are all "electronics
tech" while Microsoft is purely "software tech" which is the prevalent
definition of tech today.

~~~
j4yav
Microsoft is not software only, and tech doesn't only mean software as far as
I understand it. Or would you say Tesla isn't a technology company?

~~~
nawgszy
I'm not sure if this is intentionally obtuse, but yes "tech" as a slang term
doesn't mean "technology", it describes a type of company largely known for
the prowess and scale of their user-facing software. This includes such
entities as Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Amazon, but is
not inclusive of course.

Tesla, on the other hand, clearly produces technological artifacts - quite
impressive ones, at that - but they are not a "tech" company within the
colloquial context you've stumbled into

~~~
NikolaNovak
It must be _very_ context specific; I'm in IT, in an English-speaking country
(Toronto,Canada), and don't even remotely think of "Tech" as "front-end user-
facing software only". :-/

~~~
nawgszy
What kind of companies do you call "tech" companies then? I can't really
understand the objection I'm facing, when people tell you their stock
portfolio is heavy in tech do you really think companies other than the one I
listed? I live in the Bay Area so maybe things are skewed to "local" companies
but I held a similar opinion when I was still in Canada too...

EDIT: Just to hammer it home, search "is faang tech" and weep that
"corporatefinanceinstitute.com" is on my side

~~~
Shared404
of course faang is tech. Your assertion was not "faang is tech" it was "faang
is all that tech consists of". These are not equivalent, and I recommend you
view [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies)

EDIT: Just to hammer it home, view [2] and weep that money.usnews.com is on
everyone else in this discussions side.

[2] [https://money.usnews.com/investing/stock-market-
news/slidesh...](https://money.usnews.com/investing/stock-market-
news/slideshows/best-tech-stocks-to-buy-this-year?slide=3)

To everyone else in this thread, sorry for feeding the trolls.

------
saagarjha
> 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.

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.

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.

~~~
lioeters
I quite like Helvetica Neue, it just "suits my eyes" and the shapes and
proportions feel so natural to me. Your rant about Arial made me curious how
it came about.

Ah, right, Helvetica Neue has been used for iOS and macOS for a number of
years. That makes sense why it feels so familiar.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Neue_Helvetica_(1983...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Neue_Helvetica_\(1983\))

\---

As for Arial, I found its history on the same page, as a Helvetica clone.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Arial_and_MS_Sans_Se...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Arial_and_MS_Sans_Serif)

In particular, a visual comparison of a few letters with Helvetica:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#/media/File:Helvetic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#/media/File:Helvetica,_Arial,_MS_Sans,_Bitstream_Vera_comparison.png)

Yes, I see what you mean about the flourish on R. Same with G, and the tail on
"a". I agree that Arial is inferior for pretty much every letter in the
comparison.

\---

Apple recently replaced Helvetica Neue with San Fransisco (the name is
confusing to me, because they had a font of the same name years ago).

Why Apple Abandoned the World's Most Beloved Typeface -
[https://www.wired.com/2015/06/apple-abandoned-worlds-
beloved...](https://www.wired.com/2015/06/apple-abandoned-worlds-beloved-
typeface/)

I was curious if you had any opinion on the San Fransisco font?

------
aphroz
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).

~~~
forgotmypw17
An absolutely insane amount of research, testing, and polishing went into
Windows 3.11 and Windows 95, and I think the ratio of polish to code reached
its peak for Microsoft.

Edit: Just to clarify, I am talking mainly of the UI here, not the underlying
OS, which was, of course, very basic.

Although with virtualized hardware, my experience of running both Windows 95
and Windows ME have been quite good.

~~~
kanox
Seriously? Windows 95 and 98 were extremely prone to crashes and it took many
years for Microsoft to get past a reputation for low quality.

It took until Windows XP to get a reasonably stable desktop OS.

~~~
userbinator
As my other reply here notes, the thin (and permissive) virtualisation layer
means that badly written applications could crash the system, but I blame that
on the applications more than anything else; too bad that most people seemed
to think MS was to blame, when DOS had even less protection. I used 98se as my
daily OS until well into the Vista era (at which point I gradually switched
into XP), and it was definitely not the "reboot multiple times a day" that
some others have experienced, but then again, I also wasn't in the habit of
running lots of low-quality applications either. Uptimes of over a month
weren't uncommon, and were usually brought to an end more often than not due
to myself doing something stupid with the application I was writing.

(In fact, I've experienced far more trouble of various sorts with a recent new
machine that runs Win10.)

~~~
eru
See also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281932)

> The original version of Sim City was written for windows 3.x and included a
> bug that read memory that had been freed to the system. It worked in windows
> 3.x, even though it shouldn't, because that particular range of memory
> wasn't being used for anything else until the program was terminated.

> In beta versions of windows 95 Sim City didn't work because the operating
> system allocated memory differently, and Sim City would crash as expected
> because of the bug in the program. Amazingly, in the final version of Win95
> the original Sim City worked. Microsoft engineers had actually tested
> backwards compatibility with Sim city, located the bug, and worked around it
> in their sourcecode.

~~~
simonh
Workarounds like that which detect a particular app running and enable a
special mode are called a Shim, Microsoft created hundreds of them to ensure
compatibility in new OS versions with popular apps.

------
gfiorav
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.

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.

------
fermienrico
I love the font used in this article. It’s an easy to read slab serif without
too much slab and with lovely bits of serifs.

~~~
iso8859-1
How can you find out what it is called? The inspector in Chrome shows the
highest preference font as LAText, but I can't find any good results when I
search for that.

~~~
raindropm
It does! I use the inspect element cursor and hover at any text, it'll
automatically show the popup with details and font family of said text.

~~~
cooper12
If you click the "Computed" tab next to the CSS rules, and scroll down, at the
bottom there's "Rendered fonts", which confirms that it's LAText.

------
marsantwo
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.

------
lalos
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.

------
andrekandre
as a slight aside, i found this article very easy to read...

i appreciated the break-up every few paragraphs with a new heading and a
picture or two

makes for a big contrast to "wall of text" articles that can get tiring after
a pqge or so

