There was a brief era when the Mac came out in 1984 when bitmap fonts were the thing. I had a lovely ImageWriter printer that could print them all out.

Emigre was one of the early people to push design in that area. They still have a section on their "low res" fonts:

http://www.emigre.com/EFfeature.php?di=101

Through their fonts, and in Emigre magazine, the did spend a lot of time discussing what was aesthetically pleasing.

Then the LaserWriter took over, and postscript fonts became more of the norm.