3 ms·

Going off the main topic—just went through your “Red” page and, as always, it’s a treat. (I think you might be a bit too quick to dismiss the historical paucity

Going off the main topic—just went through your “Red” page and, as always, it’s a treat. (I think you might be a bit too quick to dismiss the historical paucity of inks, given how very traditionalist typography is, but then again even among the most progressive of artists it’s still the bathing of the red horse for some reason... Also a bit surprised to see no mention of amber screens alongside green ones, even if colours of early monochrome terminals seem to have been more constrained by the available coatings and their properties than by ergonomics.) A technical note: it seems unfortunate for an article about red on white background that illustrations have their colours transformed by default in dark mode, so maybe a manual exception is in order for this specific page?

gwern 5y ago
I've never run into much material about amber screens, so while I know of them, I dunno if they were anything but a minor variant or if they worked better or if users liked them more. The green motif is so much more dominant in computing history memories. (You make a good point about dark mode - it uses a heuristic to decide to invert, which is correct on images with a lot of white, which you usually don't want to see in dark mode, but /Red is an exception where the page is specifically about the color. I'll disable inverting on those images.)
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  I have to admit I have no deep knowledge of amber screens, I just thought of them because the first computer I’ve seen had one (and even now I prefer amber on black to green on black). I think there was the thing where a green screen requires less beam energy for the same brightness, but while I can see why this might be relevant for oscilloscopes, which use electrostatic deflection (and indeed almost universally have green screens), for a large terminal screen with electromagnetic deflection it shouldn’t be that important. And besides, colour TVs existed (if perhaps not in a very affordable form) long before the 70s, so one would think that by the time of the VT100 it should have been possible to make a screen of whatever colour one wanted. Yet that is apparently not true?

gwern 5y ago

I've never run into much material about amber screens, so while I know of them, I dunno if they were anything but a minor variant or if they worked better or if users liked them more. The green motif is so much more dominant in computing history memories. (You make a good point about dark mode - it uses a heuristic to decide to invert, which is correct on images with a lot of white, which you usually don't want to see in dark mode, but /Red is an exception where the page is specifically about the color. I'll disable inverting on those images.)

mananaysiempre 5y ago
I have to admit I have no deep knowledge of amber screens, I just thought of them because the first computer I’ve seen had one (and even now I prefer amber on black to green on black). I think there was the thing where a green screen requires less beam energy for the same brightness, but while I can see why this might be relevant for oscilloscopes, which use electrostatic deflection (and indeed almost universally have green screens), for a large terminal screen with electromagnetic deflection it shouldn’t be that important. And besides, colour TVs existed (if perhaps not in a very affordable form) long before the 70s, so one would think that by the time of the VT100 it should have been possible to make a screen of whatever colour one wanted. Yet that is apparently not true?