> But there was a reason green screens and especially amber/yellow displays were popular long after color displays came out

Yes; monochrome monitors were typically higher resolution and color adapters could usually handle only very few simultaneous colors, providing very little benefit for the tradeoff of resolution.

IBM MDA (1981, monochrome text-only) was 80×25 text with a 9×14 font, or 720×348.

IBM CGA (also 1981) had 320×200 4-color graphics, and 640×200 monochrome graphics, with at most 80×25 8×8 text.

Hercules InGraphic (1982) had the same text mode as MDA plus 720×348 monochrome graphics.

IBM EGA (1984) highest resolution mode on a color monitor was 640×350.

It wasn't until VGA (1987) that there was a common PC color adapter that could drive a color monitor at or above the resolution of MDA text and Hercules graphics.

So, yeah, there was a good reason that monochrome (either alone or alongside a color display) hung around in the PC world.

>>It wasn't until VGA (1987)... Personally, I didn't know anyone doing graphics on them. They were for pure text usages: programming, point-of-sale, etc. I think that's the reason they eventually died out: It wasn't people were giving them up, it was the home market taking off and people wanting color for games, photo editing, etc. People that worked on computers all day, were still using and loving their amber displays.

I was still using amber Wyse terminals well into the 2000s...Its like the old joke: Would you rather have a Wyse display or a 3270 keyboard ?

> Personally, I didn't know anyone doing graphics on them. They were for pure text usages: programming, point-of-sale, etc

Sure, and it wasn't until VGA that color displays could match MDA text quality, in theory, with the right display. But even then they were much more expensive.

>there was a reason green screens and especially amber/yellow displays were popular long after color displays came out...

yes, and the reason was the fuzzy-blurryness of color display technology at that time, and the fact that those in the industry were already used to monochrome displays and had workflows and settings adapted to monochrome. Once color display quality became high enough, monochrome demand completely evaporated.

I'm not saying that there is nothing nice about a monochrome display, and displaying light on black (my terminal and emacs windows are still black background, with a distinct fondness for green; I too am an old-timer), but still...

>>yes, and the reason was the fuzzy-blurryness of color display technology at that time, and the fact that those in the industry were already used to monochrome displays and had workflows and settings adapted to monochrome. Once color display quality became high enough, monochrome demand completely evaporated.

Eh? no one had color back then.. You had monochrome - you just got to pick which color you wanted: white, yellow, amber or green.

And I never saw monochrome demand 'evaporate' - I saw lots of new people come into computing in the 90s that wanted color for games, photo editing, whatever.

edit: what I mean is, there weren't enough of us 'text only' people to make it worth while for manufacturers with the armies of new users coming in with games, gui's and all that

I used to be quite fond of the amber CRTs, and still am from an aesthetic point of view. Also, for roughly my first decade of programming I used white text on blue background almost exclusively. So I get those who like dark mode. But eventually me and my eyes got older.

yeah - I find as I get older, I prefer a darker environment for working on the computer (turn of the room lights, etc) and a bright(blinding!) environment for working with my hands ;-) (Where did that #%$#% screw go!)

I also find, I'm _waaayy_ more annoyed by smudges on my glasses then when I was younger.

> It might have been standard on web pages...

It kinda became that - with internet explorer and front-page? IE had different styles from Netscape and mosaic that both featured grey backgrounds and black text (blue/purple links).

I'll take your word for it :-) I don't really remember the early web well enough to recall. I was much more IRC/Gopher then WWW back then. Also, I was too cheap to pay for Turbo-C on windows back then, so I was using linux/gcc. I missed most of the early IE 'fun' :-)

Actually, come to think of it - I think front page was the harbinger of white backgrounds - not ie. I think the standard ie user style sheet also used black on grey.

Yeah, #cccccc/silver was the default body background-color long ago.