Well, to be fair, I didn't have Helvetica available at the time I developed my hatred of Arial to compare. And when I look at blown-up / high res versions of Arial text now on my spiffy MacBook screen, they don't look so bad. But looking at old screenshots of Win3.1 still draws my ire. Verdana would have made Windows look so much better had they made that the main OS sans-serif. Arial's just so... pedestrian.

It may have had much more to do with the fact that Win 3.11 had shitty text display than with any real problem with Arial. But Arial really did look horrendous to my eyes compared to Verdana, on the same machine. I do think that had I had access to Helvetica back then I would have liked it more. But without a time machine it's impossible to tell.

I also grew up with computers and started looking at text on screens from the fourth grade. I'd had a long time to develop my eye for type by the time I was writing papers in high school. I could look at a page of printed text and tell which (Microsoft) font it was using, I doubt many kids back then could. I do think I'd have been able to tell Arial from Helvetica. There are quite a few differences between the two. Enough that my practiced eye would be able to tell the difference. Not that my programming day job affords me much practice in that regard.