Shadow-mask CRTs were the best ever for low-res antialiased text. It looked great for the low resolutions of the time. (Even trinitron wasn't as good.) You wer

Shadow-mask CRTs were the best ever for low-res antialiased text. It looked great for the low resolutions of the time. (Even trinitron wasn't as good.) You were guaranteed a near-gaussian point in the output, and from a signal-processing POV, this makes filtering and display just really beautiful and easy to do right. For instance, you could do a totally convincing subpixel translation with no visible artifacts.