While I was doing research for a personal project I found the work Donald Knuth on computers and typesetting. I was fascinated by the desire of this computer scientist to achieved his goal.

Knuth’s computers and typesetting project was the result of his frustration with the lack of decent software for the typesetting of mathematical and technical documents. The result of his project include TeX (software) for typesetting, Metafont (programming language) for font construction and the Computer Modern typefaces that are the default fonts used by TeX.

I invite you to read these articles on Wikipedia and learn more about this project:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METAFONT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX