New York was the original Mac font with serifs -- not that this really matters for anything, and I really don't want to flog a dead horse when there are more important things going on .
Anyway, if you're interested, take a look at http://www.wap.org/journal/fontsoverview/fontsquickoverview.html, for instance. Here are some excerpts:
When the Macintosh was introduced in January 1984, the first thing users noticed were the fonts. Prior to the Macintosh, computers generally displayed everything on screen in a single, monospaced font. In contrast, most of the Macintosh "city" fonts (Athens, Chicago, Geneva, London, New York, San Francisco, Venice) were proportionally spaced fonts, and only one -- Monaco -- was a monospaced font. Almost overnight, the Macintosh became a darling of amateur typographers, and hundreds of shareware fonts sprang into being.
A couple years later Apple introduced PostScript printing with the LaserWriter, and typography really took off. The LaserWriter was capable of reproducing commercial-quality printing, and the original "city" fonts were banished, replaced by Avant Garde, Bookman, Courier, Helvetica, New Century Schoolbook, Palatino, Symbol, Times, and Zapf Chancery.
Progress, however, often has casualties, as it did this time: the very simple Macintosh now seemed to be beset by all kinds of font confusion. New York looked much like Times, Palatino, Bookman and New Century Schoolbook.
. . .
Times, one of the most widely used fonts in the world, was created for the body text of The Times of London. All PostScript printers include Times as a standard font, and a variant, Times Roman, is the default font on all non-PostScript laser printers by Hewlett-Packard and Canon.
Recall that the original Mac didn't have a laser printer or any PostScript printing available. Printing was typically to an ImageWriter printer via QuickDraw, using bitmapped images.
All this is in the interest of accuracy and nostalgia, not argumentativeness :-). It's hard to believe we're looking back 20 years now.
Actually, it was almost never called that. On the font menu, the label "Times" was used to select "Times-Roman", "Times-Italic", "Times-Bold", and "Times-BoldItalic" (punctuated and capitalized exactly was written, less the quotes). One of the seldom-appreciated features of the real typography on the Mac was that selecting "bold" or "italic" for many of the laserprinted fonts would automatically select an entirely different font. This was most noticeable for italic text, but was also noticeable for bold.
Examples: aa bb.
The italic "a" has nothing in common with the shape of the Roman "a". The bold "b" is closer to the non-bold "b", but the left-side features are completely different. Generally serif fonts use italic characters for "italics" and sans-serif fonts simply slant normal characters, but a few sans-serif fonts use a true italic style (my favorite, btw, was called "Financial" from the package "More Fonts for Windows". Anyone ever seen it?)