misc-fixed is a collection of monospace bitmap fonts that is distributed with the X Window System.

Their individual origin is not attributed, but it is likely that many of them were created in the early or mid 1980s as part of MIT's Project Athena, or at its industrial partner, DEC.

[1] The individual fonts in the collection have a short name that matches their respective pixel dimensions, plus a letter that indicates a bold or oblique variant.

This project's goal was to get Linux developers interested in abandoning the 1990s dominant ISO 8859-1 encoding, in favour of using UTF-8 instead, which happened indeed within a few years.

Thanks to this effort, all the misc fixed fonts now cover the characters found in The 6x13, 8x13, 9x15, 9x18, and 10x20 fonts cover a much larger repertoire, that covers in addition the comprehensive CEN MES-3A European Unicode 3.2 subset, the International Phonetic Alphabet, Armenian, Georgian, Thai, Yiddish, all Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic characters, all mathematical symbols (including the entire TeX repertoire), APL, Braille, Runes, and much more.