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:
Actually, while on nostalgia lane, does anyone else remember the font called Boston II? It was a shareware font that was the best ImageWriter bitmap font ever. It was a thing of beauty. I've looked for it occasionally, but I haven't found any web references for it.
The OverbiteFF extension (http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/) will let you use the gopher protocol as well. I actually installed it just so I could browse the floodgap gopher server.
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.