Indeed, and that experience was one of my first exposures to display factors leading to eye strain. I started on an Apple ][ connected to one of those nice gre

Indeed, and that experience was one of my first exposures to display factors leading to eye strain. I started on an Apple ][ connected to one of those nice green screen monitors. Never felt eyestrain. Everything was sharp. But green. Got a machine at home, and it was an Atari. On a color set, the white on blue worked pretty well. Moderate eye strain. Moved that computer to a smaller blak and white TV, and it was all much better. White on grey mostly. Brought an Apple home, and the white on black was harsh on TV screens, a bit better on the black and white TV. Turns out the color set was just not sharp and that was the primary driver of eyestrain. The right colors helped. Atari picked that white on blue because it made the most of a 70's era color TV. And it mattered. After a time, I got hold of a newer smaller color set and tweaked it to the max, going for as monitor like as I could get it. Everything was improved and I ended up using that set for a number of years, until I got myself a green screen suitable for 8 bit computers. My first PC was a CGA unit, and those were a little rough for text, and it was due to a poor CRT with a coarse phosphor layout. Life got much better when I could get hold of basically any VGA screen. Was sharp enough, good color selection, good resolution. 640x480 seemed so damn roomy for longer than it should have, but it was the 8 bit experiences contributing to that. My programming experiences were similar to many here. 8 bit basic, 6502 assembly, and the Apple was luxurious with a fast disk drive and included monitor / assembler. Was great to develop a piece of something in assembly, BSAVE it, then BLOAD it into the main BASIC program. Compared to cassette it was awesome! I did use a cassette for about two years and ended up making custom tapes, just the right length for programs I used frequently. Could just LOAD, and do the thing, flip the tape over, and do that again. Also used the shorter ones for assembly bits, and a similar process. Didn't even know what a linker was. I would map out the RAM, plan out what was going to happen, then develop in pieces, each thing written where it's going to live, saved off, and then combined with the main program, until at one point, it all gets loaded in for a master save and then run to check.