Thirty Years Ago, Microsoft Released Windows 3.1 and the TrueType Font Pack for Windows

Today, April 6th, 2022, is the 30th anniversary of the release of Microsoft Windows 3.1 and the companion TrueType Font Pack for Windows. This was a watershed moment in my career closing off two years of intense focus. It brought together both a new font technology and new fonts into a product release. Although this was a project that I spent a lot of time on, it was not a solo effort; there were many people on many teams both with-in and outside of Microsoft that allowed this work to come together.

Like my previous LinkedIn articles, I’ll use press releases of the time to help narrate the story and I’ll provide some background on why some of the decisions were made. 

Microsoft Announces Worldwide Availability of Windows 3.1
Latest Version of Operating System Is Faster, More Reliable, Easier to Use

CHICAGO — April 6, 1992 — Microsoft Corporation today announced the worldwide 
availability of the Microsoft® Windows™ operating system version 3.1. The PC 
software system includes more than 1,000 enhancements — based on the most 
extensive user feedback ever obtained in the computer industry — that make it 
faster, more rugged and easier to use.

Microsoft said the enhancements to Windows had created unprecedented user demand, 
with more than one million orders worldwide in advance of today’s release. As of 
this morning, more than 20,000 resellers worldwide were able to offer more than 
750,000 copies of Windows 3.1 to customers. And Microsoft delivered the Windows 
3.1 Upgrade to another 175,000 end users today via Federal Express.

The release of Windows 3.1 was important for Microsoft. Sales of Windows 3.0 raised that product out of the relative obscurity of Windows 1.0 and 2.0, but the expectations for Windows 3.1 were greater than any prior Microsoft product release. Early reviews of the product were coming out and they were incredibly positive. The strong points of Windows 3.1 being the improved reliability of the product, support for the Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technology, and the great new font support with TrueType.

As part of the mechanics of shipping Windows 3.1, several other products, including PowerPoint 3.0, were released within a few weeks of each other. Most of these products had been years in development, starting immediately following the release of Windows 3.0 in May of 1990. There was one product, though, that didn’t exist a mere three months before the release—the TrueType Font Pack for Windows. Just two weeks before the availability of Windows, on March 23rd, was the first public announcement of both the existence and the release date of this product. I will provide some context of where this product came from and why we chose to create it.

Microsoft Introduces the TrueType Font Pack for Windows; 44 Additional TrueType 
Fonts for Windows 3.1

REDMOND, Wash. — March 23, 1992 — Microsoft Corporation today announced Microsoft® 
TrueType® Font Pack for Windows™, a collection of 44 high-quality TrueType fonts 
designed and selected specifically for the Windows environment.

Like the 14 TrueType fonts that ship as part of Microsoft Windows operating system 
version 3.1, these additional 44 outline fonts provide superior type, at any size, 
that will work with all applications, displays and printers supported by the 
Windows operating system.

“The TrueType Font Pack gives all users of Windows, from the first-time PC user to 
the sophisticated business professional, a powerful, yet inexpensive and easy-to-
use solution for creating great looking documents,” said Steve Shaiman, Microsoft 
general manager for the systems peripheral and accessories group. “The Font Pack 
is simply the best way to extend the power of TrueType and enhance the value of 
all your Windows-based applications and printers.”

Because the same font is used for both screen and printer, TrueType always 
provides true WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). The TrueType Font Pack works 
with all Windows-based applications, and prints to any of the more than 200 common 
printers supported under Windows — including dot matrix printers, ink-jet 
printers, and Hewlett-Packard® and PostScript® laser printers.

The TrueType rasterizer is integrated into the Windows version 3.1 operating 
system, so TrueType will work with future versions of the operating system and 
with any Windows-based application. Because the TrueType rasterizer is part of the 
Windows graphics device interface, installation is easy; the Font Pack setup 
program installs the fonts automatically and makes the fonts available to all 
Windows-based applications. The TrueType Font Pack for Windows has the same system 
requirements as Windows version 3.1.

This was the first introduction of the Microsoft font pack. It tied in with the early reviews of Windows 3.1 that praised how well the TrueType technology was integrated into Windows. It may seem quaint now, but there had been other font technologies like Adobe Type Manager and Bitstream’s Speedo that were available for Windows 3.0 as separate add-ons, but they did not seamlessly work across all Windows-based applications and common printers.

Steve Shaiman was the General Manager of the Systems Peripheral and Accessories Group, which as the name somewhat implies, covered a hodge-podge of various products. It included Microsoft’s hardware products such as the Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard, printing solutions like the new TrueImage, and all the fonts provided for Windows 3.1. Steve’s team was responsible for the creation of the Font Pack, and my group reported through him.

TrueType Fonts Provided by Monotype Typography and Bigelow & Holmes

The Microsoft TrueType Font Pack for Windows is comprised of 44 fonts from 
Monotype Typography Inc. and Bigelow & Holmes Inc. These two respected companies 
have each supplied 22 faces to the TrueType Font Pack. Monotype Typography 
provided the core set of TrueType system fonts for Windows version 3.1. The 
Monotype fonts in the TrueType Font Pack combined with the system fonts completes 
a collection that matches the set of standard fonts included with most PostScript 
printers.

“Monotype was a very early supporter of the TrueType font format,” said Rene 
Kerfante, managing director of Monotype Typography Inc. “By providing some of our 
best-known fonts in TrueType formats for Windows and the TrueType Font Pack we are 
giving users of Windows access to the same high-quality fonts similar to those 
used by professional typesetters.”

The Monotype 22 Font Set

As part of the technology cross-license with Apple, Microsoft needed to provide fonts for both the TrueType technology in Windows 3.1 and the TrueImage printing technology. I previously discussed why Microsoft chose the Monotype core thirteen fonts for Windows and TrueImage, but an additional twenty-two fonts were needed to complete the requirements for the TrueImage technology. For this, Monotype provided the following fonts: four variants (regular, bold, italic, and bold italic) of Arial Narrow, Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, Century Gothic & Century Schoolbook, and one font each of Monotype Corsiva & Monotype Sorts (the latter being a dingbats font). Besides shipping with the TrueImage technology, the PowerPoint 3.0 team chose to deliver these same twenty-two fonts with their product that would be available to customers in May of 1992, one month after the release of Windows 3.1.

Bigelow & Holmes Inc. provided an exclusive collection of 22 Lucida® fonts, a set 
designed to meet many of the diverse font and printing needs of users. The Lucida 
faces offer the user a wide variety of font text styles as well as specific-use 
fonts such as those for clear fax transmittals and for mathematical use.

“The Lucida collection is our best-known design, and we are excited to be 
providing it in TrueType format,” said Chuck Bigelow, president of Bigelow & 
Holmes, Inc. “Users of Windows are creating more sophisticated documents requiring 
unique character sets and font styles, and this collection will meet those needs.”

The Lucida Font Family

Early on, the hope was to provide a super-family of fonts called Lucida with Windows 3.1. The family was designed by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow in the early 1980’s. According to Charles, “The goal of Lucida was to create a new, original family of fonts for medium and low-resolution digital printers and displays.” The inspiration for the font family, according to the 2017 Computer History Museum Oral History of Charles Bigelow, “…came when I was working on [some] Native American texts, and I thought it’d be great to have a book [where] you have a serif and a sans serif type, one for English, one for, in this case, Kiksht; it’s called Chinookan. ... And we corresponded with Hans Meyer and worked on the idea of developing extra characters for Native American languages. So I thought, okay, for us to develop a type, we wanted to develop a type for low-resolution or medium-resolution printers and screens.”

Microsoft originally decided to add the Lucida font family directly into the Windows 3.1 product, and it was available in early beta versions. The Lucida fonts included, Lucida Blackletter, Lucida Bright in four variants (regular, demibold, italic, & demibold italic), Lucida Calligraphy, Lucida Fax in four variants, Lucida Handwriting, Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Typewriter both in four variants, Lucida Bright Math Extension, Lucida Bright Math Italic, and Lucida Bright Math Symbol for twenty-two fonts. And then the dingbat fonts of Lucida Arrows, Lucida Icons, & Lucida Stars for a grand total of twenty-five fonts.

Sample text for Lucida Bright

After the Beta 2 release in the summer of 1991, it was clear that it would be difficult fitting all the features that customers wanted for Windows 3.1 onto a reasonable number of floppy disks. Having too many floppy disks was inconvenient for the customer and increased the cost of the product. So, some feature was going to be removed from the product—and it ended up being the Lucida family of fonts. There were many cries of anguish at this decision on our team, we felt that the Lucida Fonts brought a nice modern feel to Windows 3.1 that would help to differentiate the core font Times New Roman, Arial or Helvetica-look used on other platforms. It is not my intention to downplay those core fonts, and we put considerable effort into making those fonts shine at the highest levels, but there was something very intriguing about providing fonts that were originally designed for low-resolution devices like computer screens and lower-end printers.

There was, though, one additional challenge to deal with. Three of the Lucida dingbat fonts had become quite popular during the beta versions for Windows 3.1—Lucida Arrows, Lucida Icons, & Lucida Stars. It was decided that Windows 3.1 could afford to take one additional font, and we worked with Bigelow & Holmes to create a “best of” the Lucida dingbat fonts and we called this new font Wingdings.

Characters in the Wingdings font.

Creating a Font Pack

In December 1991, with a growing set of fonts that were not going to ship with Windows 3.1, a decision was made to create a new product that hopefully we could deliver alongside Windows. Although we had the font files mostly ready, we had to fine tune some of the fonts and make additional arrangements with the owners of the fonts. Adding a new SKU required creating software to install the fonts, procuring materials for the physical product (e.g., floppy disks, paper documentation, and the cardboard product box), securing time at our manufacturing facility to assemble the product, and developing all of the marketing and packaging collateral necessary for such a product. We also had to figure out how to make the product known to customers. All of this had to be completed in a few short months as we targeted a small beta release date of February 18th.

Advertisement for the TrueType Font Pack.

Shipping the Font Pack

The Windows operating system version 3.1 is available for a suggested retail price 
of $149.95. Current users of Windows can upgrade to Windows 3.1 at a special 
Microsoft discount price of $49.99 between now and June 1, after which the price 
is $79.95.

A special offer of $99.99 for the Windows 3.1 Upgrade and special 44-font TrueType 
font package is good until June 1 and is $179.99 thereafter.

A postcard was sent to registered users of Windows 3.0 providing a special upgrade offer of $99.99, $50 dollars off the normal price. On top of that, there was a check-box on the card offering the TrueType font package for an additional $50.00, $29.95 off the normal price.

Floppy disk for the Microsoft TrueType Font Pack.

The offer was quite successful. Somewhat jokingly, our team was told to conserve our use of floppy disks, as we were struggling to provide enough for all the packaged products going out. There actually might have been some truth to this as the Seattle Times carried an article three days after the release of the TrueType Font Pack indicating that there was a backlog due to unexpected demand for the font pack.

After spending over two years working on TrueType and the TrueType fonts for Windows, it was very rewarding to see the fonts available publicly. The reviewers for computer magazines continued to heap praise on TrueType and the core fonts. It was common to see the TrueType Font Pack on the counter by the cash register of software stores, where presumably people would purchase it as an impulse buy. By the end of 1992, Microsoft shipped two more Font Packs for Windows. Eventually, the Font Pack concept for Windows 95 changed into the Microsoft Plus! Companion for Windows 95 package that contained fonts (including Verdana, Georgia, Trebuchet, and the now infamous Comic Sans), the first version of the Internet Explorer browser, and other accessories for Windows 95.