This is obviously subjective, but I'd argue that not only are the fonts we have available today better, but that anti-aliased fonts have been better for years.

This is obviously subjective, but I'd argue that not only are the fonts we have available today better, but that anti-aliased fonts have been better for years. Even monospaced programming fonts. This includes fonts descended from Bitstream Vera (which include the Deja Vu Sans you mentioned, as well as Apple's Menlo), and we have some fonts -- like Microsoft's excellent Consolas and the amazing Input series from Font Bureau -- which are explicitly designed to be displayed with anti-aliasing. In the time these SGI fonts were new --- really up through the turn of the century -- the case for pixel programming fonts was better, I think, especially when you used light text on a dark background; our "high-resolution" displays were rarely more than 75 dpi with 18-bit color. But as historically important as unaliased 9-point Monaco may be, I'm not going to use it for nostalgic purposes.