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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
by 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 agoI 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?