Did a calligraphy class really give the Mac its fonts?

Partly. Steve Jobs said in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford that if he had never dropped in on a single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. The course was real: after dropping out of Reed College he audited a calligraphy class taught by Robert Palladino. But the letters of the Mac were drawn by another person, the artist Susan Kare, who had no experience in computer graphics and said she did not know the first thing about designing a typeface.

Kare was asked by Andy Hertzfeld in 1982 to hand-draw some icons and font elements. He suggested she buy a grid notebook of the smallest graph paper she could find and mock up pixel pictures of his software commands. In only one year she designed the core visual design language of the original Macintosh, including many typefaces and icons.

Jobs's contribution was the idea and the taste. Kare's first font, Chicago, applied Jobs's idea of variable spacing, where each character has the unique pixel width it needs, to set the computer apart from a monospaced typewriter. Jobs's fascination with typography, as one source puts it, gave the Mac an unprecedented variety of fonts and type styles.

So the answer is a partnership. By Jobs's own account, a calligraphy class gave him a feeling for beautiful letters, and a fine artist with a graph-paper notebook turned that taste into pixels.