It's still disconcerting to me to see that monotype.com after the Helvetica headline. Monotype and Linotype were fierce rivals since their inception in the late 19th century. The cases where a typeface was offered for both Monotype and Linotype hot metal were rare (Times New Roman and Sabon being the most notable cases). It was only in the post-digital era that we saw consolidation where Agfa (at that time wholly owned by Bayer, the aspirin people) bought the company¹ and merged it with their prepress division, Agfa Compugraphic. It was later sold to a private equity firm who 7 years later bought Linotype, at that time owned by German printing company Heidelberg. They've continued their acquisitions since then purchasing FontShop, the largest indie vendor of typefaces, ITC which was founded as a platform-independent supplier of typeface designs and, most recently URW, a newer entry in the type world but largely influential for high-quality designs (alongside some copied designs) and for the creation of Ikarus which was the first outline-based type description system, predating even Metafont.²
1. The late 20th century Monotype was the descendant of the English spin-off of the American parent company. Lanston Monotype did not survive the transition from hot metal typesetting and was never the significant producer of new designs that English Monotype was. Last I heard, the remains of American Monotype (aka Lanston Monotype) were held by a Canadian printer, although that was 20 years ago and he was not a young man so I don't know now).
2. I had previously thought that Metafont was the first outline-based type design system, not realizing Ikarus's priority until recently.
Ah, so I wasn't imagining it. I know little about font history, but I know that Arial is a Monotype thing, and Arial is a metrically-compatible Helvetica look-alike, so it seemed strange that Helvetica would be under the same brand.
I remember talking to a Monotype executive in the wake of the Microsoft deal that gave us Arial, Book Antiqua, etc. He was embarrassed about having done it, but he said that the deal saved the company from failure. Out of the whole set, Century Gothic is the most interesting face. They reproportioned the Twentieth Century typeface (itself a clone of Futura) to match the metrics of Avant Garde and ended up with something that is neither of its predecessors.
I suspect that the Microsoft Typography group also was created around as a result of shame around the MS-Monotype deal, although I don't know for certain and I've lost touch with the people that I used to know from Microsoft Typography.
1. The late 20th century Monotype was the descendant of the English spin-off of the American parent company. Lanston Monotype did not survive the transition from hot metal typesetting and was never the significant producer of new designs that English Monotype was. Last I heard, the remains of American Monotype (aka Lanston Monotype) were held by a Canadian printer, although that was 20 years ago and he was not a young man so I don't know now).
2. I had previously thought that Metafont was the first outline-based type design system, not realizing Ikarus's priority until recently.