In between all the political bitching, no one has ever noted the fact that TNR will render correctly on basically any computer built in the last 30 years, including crusty UNIX workstations from the 90s.
> Indeed, the stronger explanation for Times New Roman’s long reign isn’t aesthetic excellence, but practicality and inertia. Times New Roman was among the small set of typefaces bundled with early versions of Windows. It was also promoted as “web-safe,” meaning webmasters could reasonably assume it would render properly across platforms. In the early era of digitalization, choosing Times New Roman was often less a deliberate endorsement than a default imposed by limited options. Over time, the habit hardened into a standard, and institutions began to require it without much reflection, effectively borrowing their own authority to confer authority upon the typeface.
When I jumped into my GNU/Linux journey in late 90s, TNR was nowhere to be found, and I believe is only available through "ms-ttcorefonts" or whatever the package is called (IOW, Times New Roman actually comes from Microsoft).
I believe "Times" is the venerable standard, and has been present on Unices and Macs since... forever. Now, TNR is the same metrics-wise IIRC, and thus it was always a recommendation to use a fallback line of the form "Times New Roman, Times, serif".
It's a bit more complex than that! The font made by Monotype for The Times in 1931 was always called Times New Roman - it was, after all, a new Roman-style typeface for The Times.
Linotype then made their own variant simply called Times Roman, which differed mostly in having slanted serifs. The Times switched to this in 1982.
Both Monotype and Linotype produced digital versions, but Linotype's was initially slightly cheaper and thus more popular. In 1984, Adobe licensed it for inclusion in the core Postscript font set, and for a while became the "default" proportional serif typeface.
As WYSIWYG word processing and DTP took off, lots of knock-offs appeared, often called something like "Thymes", "London", or just plain "Roman". At some point, Monotype reduced their prices but by the late 80s Times New Roman was sadly neglected, seen almost as just another clone (after all, The Times itself was using the Linotype version by then!).
TNR became one of the core fonts in Truetype (initially an Apple/Microsoft collaboration, intended to break Adobe's stranglehold on computer typography), so was included by default in Windows 3.1 and Apple's System 7, leading to a resurgence in its popularity.
The Times then moved to Monotype's Times Modern (which features serifs that are even more slanted than Linotype's Times Roman) when they moved to tabloid format in the early 2000s. Monotype bought Linotype at around the same time, so all three fonts are now available from the same source at the same price.
