>and wonder why we didn't have the modern, flat, solid color designs that are fashionable today back then. A lot of UI design on computers of the era was flat

>and wonder why we didn't have the modern, flat, solid color designs that are fashionable today back then. A lot of UI design on computers of the era was flat colors, maybe with a mild gradient. Go look up screenshots from Windows 3.1. Everything is flat grey or white. Windows 9x wasn't really much better, except it had that ugly solid teal background. Also, dithering on a CRT produced a very different effect from dithering on a high-res LCD.