On: Sysadmin war story: the network ate my font

[zaxomi]

> This leads to an obvious question: "why did the programmers not always just embed the font?".

Historically the size of hard-disks have been very limited, so it was important to save a file with as few bytes as possible.

Also the serial transfer speed to the printer was very low, so it was important to limit how much data that was sent for each print job.