They are really nice, but I wonder if the fonts we have available today are not better - if only because more eyeballs have been using and improving them.
Also, having unicode glyphs is more important now that it was before. If my font can't show "άꚍαραξία", or "∀ a,b,c ∈ ℝ³", I think I am missing something, even if it looks good.
Droid Sans and Deja vu Sans look perfect to me. But I never got to use an actual SGI, so maybe I'm missing something about the technical advantage of using these fonts.
The main advantage of this sort of font is that you can see the pixels. This may not be to all tastes, but at ~95dpi I find pixelly fonts easier on the eye. The right angles and hard edges seem to make it easier for my eyes to get the right focus setting.
(I think it's nicer than the 6x13 SGI one (Screen 13pt on OS X) which is a bit cramped-looking. The 7x14 SGI one (Screen 14pt on OS X) is much better - looks like basically the same glyphs as 6x13, but with an extra pixel breathing room.)
The right angles and hard edges seem to make it easier for my eyes to get the right focus setting.
I agree; when I first used an LCD, the best part of the experience was how sharp everything looked. On a CRT the pixels were somewhat blurry no matter what, but the LCD made the pixels actually look like little squares and it felt like my eyes were in focus. I can stand antialiasing on large fonts but small text looks better to me without AA, and subpixel AA just makes me feel dizzy since my eyes seem to be continually trying to focus to get those sharp edges.
Misc-Fixed is my favourite font too, although I've modified mine with a slashed zero to make 0 and O more distinctive.
I'm quite fond of non-antialiased fonts on regular DPI monitors flipped to portrait orientation, secondary ones on machines where that means VGA output. And lacklustre TN panels on laptops. Some environments really need more forgiving technology…
This is obviously subjective, but I'd argue that not only are the fonts we have available today better, but that anti-aliased fonts have been better for years. Even monospaced programming fonts. This includes fonts descended from Bitstream Vera (which include the Deja Vu Sans you mentioned, as well as Apple's Menlo), and we have some fonts -- like Microsoft's excellent Consolas and the amazing Input series from Font Bureau -- which are explicitly designed to be displayed with anti-aliasing.
In the time these SGI fonts were new --- really up through the turn of the century -- the case for pixel programming fonts was better, I think, especially when you used light text on a dark background; our "high-resolution" displays were rarely more than 75 dpi with 18-bit color. But as historically important as unaliased 9-point Monaco may be, I'm not going to use it for nostalgic purposes.
Also, having unicode glyphs is more important now that it was before. If my font can't show "άꚍαραξία", or "∀ a,b,c ∈ ℝ³", I think I am missing something, even if it looks good.
Droid Sans and Deja vu Sans look perfect to me. But I never got to use an actual SGI, so maybe I'm missing something about the technical advantage of using these fonts.