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I think it just used the system UI font, so probably Segoe UI, which was pretty new at the time and Microsoft loved to use it.
(Specifically on Windows Vista and later. On Windows XP, it would still have been Tahoma.)
If it used the default document font for the chat window (which is likely), then it would be Arial in Windows XP, and either Segoe UI or Calibri in Vista and later.
Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/vis-fonts
That "y" in "away" is pretty distinct. If this is the font you're thinking of, I am pretty sure it's Segoe... it's for SURE not Tahoma or Veranda. Neither of those fonts flatten the bottom tail of the y. Segoe does.
Edit:
Arial has it too, but based on the "s", I still think Segoe. If you draw a tip-to-tip line on the s, it's a greater angle off horizontal in segoe than Arial, and seems to my naked eye to better match the s in that screenshot.
Microsoft was all about Segoe for a while, you are probably right
Verdana? Tahoma? Arial? 🤔
One of those, I'm pretty sure. It definitely was a sans serif style font, and those 3 have been the most common defaults since before that time.
Edit: According to Microsoft's knowledge base: it was Calibri. It has used Segoe since 2012.
Do you have a link. IIRC, Calibri was mostly used as a document font, not a UI font.
Found it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/vis-fonts
it might depend on the os you used back then (XP or Vista), but probably the other commenter's (ai) response is correct
If the other one is a guess, Tahoma is another strong possibility.
Back then, not so much. Back then it was either MS Sans Serif or Arial.
It very much was not. Arial has never been a default UI font on Windows, and MS Sans Serif was replaced by Tahoma as the default in 2001. Arial has been a default document font though, so it could have been Arial.
Tahoma came in 2001? That is earlier than I thought. TIL.
Technically, Tahoma was first distributed with Office 97 in Nov 1996, and it first became the default UI font in Dec 1999 with Windows 2000, but in regards to consumer oriented Windows, it became the default UI font in Aug 2001 with Windows XP.
MS Sans Serif 10p
The likelihood of this being the correct answer is very small. By 2007, MS San Serif had been replaced by Tahoma, and then Tahoma had been replaced by Segoe UI. So MS San Serif hadn’t been used prominently by Microsoft for almost a decade.
It is possible since MSN Messenger was released in 1999, so before MS switched to using Tahoma as their default font, but I highly doubt MSN Messenger didn’t use the system’s default font, and I even more highly doubt that if they didn’t use the default font, that they didn’t update their font for almost a decade.
That was fast! Do you just know that or is there source? Also thanks!