The glyphs for the upper areas of each one appear to be drawn separately, not taken from a single master set, as there are visible differences in the appearance of various visually similar characters that are shared between the code pages.

Due to its clean style and easy readability, it has enjoyed some popularity with the programming community, even giving rise to an imitation font — Fixedsys Excelsior — which, based on the original Fixedsys typeface, also includes a large number of Unicode script ranges.

[2] There is a certain amount of similarity between Fixedsys and Chicago, the default system typeface on the Apple Macintosh between 1984 and 1997.

The key difference is that Chicago is a proportional typeface while Fixedsys is monospaced.

According to a string embedded in the .FON file (which is viewable with a hex editor or with a typeface editor such as Fony), this font was designed in 1984 by Bitstream Inc., but the high resolution 8514/a version (used in modern versions of Windows operating system as the high DPI variant, which is larger and looks different from the VGA version) was designed in 1987 by Microsoft Corporation.