Comment by WillAdams

Older OSs had pixel fonts, which were carefully hand-crafted --- vector fonts were something which folks dreamed about having, or which were accessed when using incredibly expensive printers.

Font rendering on Windows 3.11 was pretty decent, so long as one used the nicer TrueType fonts --- Times New Roman and Arial had man _years_ of hinting effort by Monotype which kicked in at typically screen sizes --- that said, certain apps would still use the older pixel fonts Tms Rmn and Helv (over which Linotype sued for trademark infringement which is part of why Monotype got the contract) as well as the "vector fonts" Roman and Modern which are (one can still access them in Windows 11) stick/plotter fonts like to the Hershey fonts. When I bought my copy of Windows 3.0, I drove almost 100 miles into Richmond to get a copy of Adobe Type Manager 1.0 for Windows.