How did fonts work prior to Mac OS X?

In the Macintosh world prior to Mac OS X, bitmap fonts and TrueType fonts lived inside suitcases. A suitcase appeared in the Finder as a special kind of folder that contained fonts and could be opened and edited.

Suitcases from professional font foundries sometimes contained a collection of bitmaps for a PostScript Type 1 font family or a TrueType font family. These bitmaps were for individual variations, or styles, of the font such as regular, italic , bold, and bold italic.