Created at Apple Computer, TrueType was designed to fill the need for an optimized, scalable font format. The format uses hinting, a technique that preserves a font's design, even at a small scale or on a display with low resolution. It was initially developed in response to the technical limitations of Adobe's Postscript and Type 1 font formats.
TrueType was first introduced in the Macintosh System 7 operating system in 1990. A year later, Apple licensed TrueType to Microsoft, and it was introduced in their Windows 3.1 operating system. After making some performance improvements to the format, they released version 1.5 in Windows NT 3.1, and have continued to update the format.