The general public was often using Times New Roman or whatever their system's default sans serif font was.
But, designers have cared about things like this for a very long time (ages, as you said.) Arial is joined at the hip with Helvetica, which got a movie[1] because of it's massive cultural impact and it's praise within design circles.
Among professional designers, there were very strong opinions on Helvetica and Arial--almost fever pitch at times. iirc, Arial exists do to the popularity of Helvetica and the background of this goes back to the 1950s. It wasn't just where it was placed in the font selection menu, it was given top billing in that menu deliberately (in Windows.) If you're interested, I think the Wikipedia page for Helvetica (Font)[2] covers it fairly deeply.
That all said, I haven't heard it hotly debated for some time now. The explosion of freely available fonts; popularity of new font families like Open Sans, Noto Sans, etc; and the ability to add custom fonts on the web seems to have slowly killed off the discourse in the last decade or so. I'm not in those design circles as often anymore, though.
Ah yeah I had totally forgotten about Helvetica having such a history. Though I wonder what you mean by putting Arial in that position deliberately - if it was alphabetical (which I remember it being) do you mean that Arial was named as such that it started with A?
I don't mean that it was literally named for the dropdown, just that generally Helvetica was the cause and Arial was the effect. From what I know, it goes back earlier to when Monotype was providing fonts for IBM printers.
From what I know, Monotype was responsible for the name Arial (although IBM called the family Sonoran Sans Serif.) But, even at that point, the intent was to create something that would stand in for Helvetica.
I don't know that the name was selected deliberately to be ahead of Helvetica. But, it's not unheard of in branding to put your product ahead of or near the competition alphabetically. (It was especially important then because people were manually looking up things in phone books and libraries.) I wouldn't be surprised to hear that aspect was considered during naming.
But, designers have cared about things like this for a very long time (ages, as you said.) Arial is joined at the hip with Helvetica, which got a movie[1] because of it's massive cultural impact and it's praise within design circles.
Among professional designers, there were very strong opinions on Helvetica and Arial--almost fever pitch at times. iirc, Arial exists do to the popularity of Helvetica and the background of this goes back to the 1950s. It wasn't just where it was placed in the font selection menu, it was given top billing in that menu deliberately (in Windows.) If you're interested, I think the Wikipedia page for Helvetica (Font)[2] covers it fairly deeply.
That all said, I haven't heard it hotly debated for some time now. The explosion of freely available fonts; popularity of new font families like Open Sans, Noto Sans, etc; and the ability to add custom fonts on the web seems to have slowly killed off the discourse in the last decade or so. I'm not in those design circles as often anymore, though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica