> Way back when color screens were considered too expensive for everyday use, computer operators used black-and-white screens. No, it was way back when the dot

> Way back when color screens were considered too expensive for everyday use, computer operators used black-and-white screens. No, it was way back when the dot pitch accessible to shadow mask CRT hardware[1] was too coarse to display more than ~300 horizontal pixels well, so computer operators used monochrome displays where they could readably get 80 characters across a screen. [1] Composite color encoding was another hurdle, though the C64 and IBM CGA got past that well enough. It wasn't until VGA monitors in 1987 that color text really broke through though.