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That's an easy question to answer - because they looked cool and futuristic. If you watch old episodes of Doctor Who or 70s films you will often see props and displays with similar fonts, and video games followed that aesthetic.

I guess those fonts had just started to appear on cheques and machine readable tickets so people associated those typefaces with computers.

Exactly, the cheque font was synonymous with sci-fi back then.

Because in the 1970s, those fonts were visual code for "computer", and there was some spillover into the 1980s. Books with a computer theme, such as type-in program books and young adult novels, often had part or all of their title set in such a font. You see it also on electronic products of the era, such as the Waddingtons Game Machine.

I love the MICR'ish fonts and still try to imitate them.