Reminds me how bad anti-aliasing on the fonts was back then.
I spend the bulk of 1993-2003 or so staring at text windows made up almost exclusively of the X11 "9x15" font. It's really not bad at all, and occasionally I still fire up an xterm in that just for kicks.
Note also that a lot of what you're identifying as "antialiasing" is simple pixel size. You could certainly generate a nicely-filtered font with a pixel height on 15 on modern systems, but on most displays it would be unreadably small. Typical programmers are working with fonts with literally twice the resolution these days.
It would be nice to do this again on modern systems.
My father only used Archimedes machines, so when we first got a Windows PC in ~1996 we both spent ages trying to make the text look nice — we assumed we had to find a setting somewhere.
I couldn't find a good screenshot of an older system, so I made one [2]. The desktop font isn't anti-aliased, only the fonts in applications. I've used the included (in ROM) !Draw to write text, successive lines are offset by one pixel to the right. Also shown is the configuration dialogue, and the interactive help for it.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20131020231733/http://acorn.chris... [2] http://i.imgur.com/bS1u5NF.png