I was watching a video from NDC by Dylan Beattie the other day on The Story of Typography and a particular section stood out to me.
The talk ranges from the initial start of writing symbols to the formation of typography as an art form and the creation of eInk displays. Well worth a watch if you have some time to spare.
The part that was interesting to me was the discussion around early word processors and the ASCII character standard. Early word processors were not able to store the amount of data required to fully render a font, so characters were rendered using a bitmap system.
Read more here: https://www.hashbangcode.com/article/creating-caracter-bitmap-php