The very first electronics graphic machine which had character display was introduced in 1967 see http://ethw.org/First-Hand:Inventing_the_Vidifont:_the_first_electronics_graphics_machine_used_in_television_production#Prior_art_in_character_generators
Most systems still used impact printers,
on the low end, there were the Teletype Model 33 ASR which was mainly used for telex (communications over the phone).
They were very slow, 33 baud (thus the name) and usually punched paper tape so that the message could be reproduced.
The idea originated from the wall street ticket tapes.
On the high end, there were high speed impact printers called line printers that used a drum rotating at a very high speed. The
drum had the characters engraved on a diagonal, and a timing wheel that triggered 132 hammers which fired at exactly the
right time so that one line of 132 characters was printed per revolution of the drum
The first video 'Terminal' (out of the box) that I ever used was introduced by DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard Massachusetts) in 1978,
and came with two character sets 1 for normal characters, and another so that simple graphics like forms could be displayed. I used other very
crude one prior to that (see below)).
A character was made up of a matrix, typically 9 x 7 pixels. see https://damieng.com/blog/2011/02/20/typography-in-8-bits-system-fonts
There were others by DEC before the VT-100, including the VT-05 which was introduced in 1970.
In the mid 70's, I was building small Intel 8080 computer systems where we created our own character sets in software.
(You can see my terminal on page 36 of https://archive.org/details/kilobaudmagazine-1978-02
.) I was just 35 back then, and
heavily involved in micros.
The demand was so great, that the science evolved very rapidly, and soon computers were shipped with monitors and computer all in one.
MITS Altair, Imsai 8080, and others.
Hope that gives you a little history.