alt Hacker NewsA forgotten point is that modern pixel fonts all assume pixels have a 1:1 ratio: height the same as width, so an 8x8 character box is perfectly square.
That's NOT true for many of the old computer displays. Most had finer resolution in the horizontal compared to vertical lines, so more pixels across than in the same distance down. 1:1 "square pixels" was an innovation of the Macintosh, and very unusual for the time. So the fonts on this page displayed on other 80's machines would not look "right". And fonts from those machines brought to modern displays also look off.
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It's not that forgotten, for example int10h font collection (which probably is the biggest bitmap font resource) prominently shows aspect-ratio corrections for the fonts https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/
Square pixels were certainly not an innovation of the Macintosh. The earliest raster scan workstation I'm aware of is the Alto, released in 1973. It and the ones that came after it like the Star and Dorado all had square pixels. So did the early 1980s engineering workstations like Apollo and Sun, which also came out before Macintosh.