I'm equally puzzled by this. The complexity argument is IMO bunk; it's no more difficult. There is however a possible efficiency argument: if you are more lik

I'm equally puzzled by this. The complexity argument is IMO bunk; it's no more difficult. There is however a possible efficiency argument: if you are more likely to write horizontal rectangles of bitmaps, then you'd want the memory word to be horizontal so you have fewer memory locations to update. Was that really the case? UPDATE: I'm was using 2016 thinking, my bad. In those days, compared to the complexity of the rest of the system, making the CRT circuits custom was trivial. If this could, even marginally, simplify the rest of the system (not least the software), it would be the right choice.