Nearly ubiquitous since the early 80's, Arial's pervasiveness is the stuff of font legend. A neutral sans serif typeface originally based on Monotype Grotesque, Arial has firmly established itself as the de-facto stand in for Helvetica, much to the chagrin of the design community at large.
Designed in 1982 for Monotype Typography by a team of ten led by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders, Arial was originally designed for the IBM 3800-3 laserxerographic printer. Arial has also shipped with every version of Microsoft Windows since version 3.1 (released in 1992). Apple, who opted to use Helvetica for it's default font, did not ship with Arial until OS X (released in 2002).