Timeline for Why were early personal computer monitors not green?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 28, 2018 at 15:43 | comment | added | Meower68 | A lot of early computers fed to an RF modulator and drove the display on a small TV. While in high school, I went to a computer programming competition conducted on a Saturday morning. We had to write programs, compute results and record the results. Some of the contestants, using the aforementioned setup (C64 w/small TV), would write their program, get it running and, while waiting for results, would flip the RF modulator and watch Saturday morning cartoons. When commercial break came, they'd flip back to the computer, note the results of their program and start on the next one. | |
| Jun 22, 2018 at 6:14 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| Jun 22, 2018 at 8:47 | |||||
| Jun 21, 2018 at 17:42 | comment | added | davidbak | @mickeyf - I was just about to make a Kermit joke but you got there first … very appropriate to rc too! | |
| Jun 21, 2018 at 15:12 | comment | added | Andy | I used to plug my VCR into the RCA inputs of a commodore monitor to watch movies. | |
| Jun 21, 2018 at 14:21 | comment | added | Dranon | @rwallace See retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/5629 for the 80x25 issue. | |
| Jun 21, 2018 at 14:21 | comment | added | Jules | @mickeyf - but what would have happened if you ran kermit on it? Then kermit would have been just as green, surely? | |
| Jun 21, 2018 at 13:20 | comment | added | trunklop | @mnem Pity that I can't find the link. One of the Workbench developers said that they took their prototype to an eletronic store, attached it to a TV set and tried different colors. White on blue was the most readable one. | |
| Jun 21, 2018 at 11:29 | comment | added | user6752 | IIRC My Kaypro's screen was greener than Kermit. | |
| Jun 21, 2018 at 5:38 | comment | added | mnem | You can even see this as late as the original Amiga OS in versions up to 1.3. It was really designed to only work properly with a RGB monitor, but the white text and blue background is still there by default, and it includes a 60-column setting in the OS to maintain readability on a cheap colour CRT TV via the onboard RF output on the A1000 and inexpensive external RF adapter on the later A500. | |
| Jun 21, 2018 at 2:26 | comment | added | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | @rwallace In my experience the 80x24 were far more common early on. So much so that a lot of software had 80x24 hardcoded so when 80x25 became more common a lot of terminals mostly (sometimes "only") used the 25th line for function key labels or similar stuff - sometimes under program control but separate from the main 24-line section. | |
| Jun 21, 2018 at 1:30 | vote | accept | rwallace | ||
| Jun 21, 2018 at 0:22 | comment | added | Brian H | @rwallace Right. Vertical resolution was not the main limiting factor. | |
| Jun 21, 2018 at 0:13 | comment | added | rwallace | Ah, that makes sense! Just to check, when you say 80x24, as I understand it, 80x25 had an equal claim on being the standard (if you happened to be using a 25-line screen in a context that required 24, the last line was usually used as a status line), presumably the existing green screens could display either, equally well? | |
| Jun 20, 2018 at 23:58 | history | answered | Brian H | CC BY-SA 4.0 |