I look at something like that these days and ask "How good is it at kerning?"

There was a time when I was setting type for a lot of posters recently, something I'd done a lot in the deep past, but this time I noticed that headlines set with serifed fonts looked atrocious. Today tools like Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and even Adobe Illustrator kern terribly out of the box although I've figured out how to kern manually with Powerpoint and you do have some options in Illustrator that are better than the default.

I see people are mostly using sans-serif today and I am wondering how much of that is that kerning sucks today. I don't remember feeling offended by it in the early 1990s or the early 2000s. I don't know if the algorithms got worse (patent war?) or if I got pickier.

On a disk, different characters have different pitches…typically fonts aren’t monospace.

Because the system is entirely mechanical, kerning is as good as the typesetter makes it. Or as bad.

The business use was camera ready art where appropriate lighting would disappear paste-up artifacts. So you could get anything you wanted with a straitedge, #11 blade, good light, time and experience. But for many uses, the quality of the typefaces was enough without kerning…I mean drawing letters by hand was and is the most expressive way to realize a unique creative vision. Using a machine means accepting a good-enough.