Anti-aliasing was first introduce to a personal computer in 1989, on the Acorn Archimedes. [1]

My father only used Archimedes machines, so when we first got a Windows PC in ~1996 we both spent ages trying to make the text look nice — we assumed we had to find a setting somewhere.

I couldn't find a good screenshot of an older system, so I made one [2]. The desktop font isn't anti-aliased, only the fonts in applications. I've used the included (in ROM) !Draw to write text, successive lines are offset by one pixel to the right. Also shown is the configuration dialogue, and the interactive help for it.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20131020231733/http://acorn.chris... [2] http://i.imgur.com/bS1u5NF.png