Comment by K0balt

I see you didn’t grow up in the 8 bit age lol.

Early computers usually displayed characters directly mapped to the screen, with no space between them. There wasn’t enough memory to store a bit for each pixel, so they stored only the characters and wrote them out one line at a time from the ROM character map. Sometimes, you could define a few characters in RAM as well. Then if you were lucky there were “sprites”, characters that could be mapped at arbitrary alignments and sometimes even rotations “on top of” the existing character map.

This is how you got a 32x64 display (often only 32x32) mapped into 2k of RAM, instead of the 16k it would take if the pixels were stored— a time when 8k RAM total was pretty standard, and 16k was a lot. Then, color became a thing and ate up a lot of memory, so even with 64k nobody was generally mapping fonts onto a pixel background. That’s why you switched to graphics modes etc.

This is also why you will find a bunch of 8x8 pixel fonts out there that have blank rows and columns built into them for spacing. It’s still very common for imbedded work, where you often have screen sizes like 64x128 and other small pixel counts, when you are trying for maximum readable density.

You can still find these fonts in the text-only display modes when you are in the POST routines off many PCs, if you unhide them in the bios…. But many BIOSs are graphics mode only now so even that is getting hard to find. Still there when booting Linux though, if you escape out of the splash screen.