The article gets some dates wrong: > The age of the amber monitor lasted from about 1987 until 1990, a mere moment in the history of computers. I remember the

The article gets some dates wrong: > The age of the amber monitor lasted from about 1987 until 1990, a mere moment in the history of computers. I remember the first time I used an amber monitor. It was in a dimly lit lab at MIT in my last year there. It was 1973. The amber monitor was hooked up to a PDP-7, an 18 bit minicomputer, and the monitor only had 40 columns. It wasn’t the first time I had used a monitor, but before that most of my programming was on cards or teletype style terminals that typed output on fan-fold continuous paper. This amber colored terminal used a primitive rasterization technique that didn’t have a fixed refresh rate so the frame rate slowed as more characters were needed on the screen. Despite the very long persistence of the amber phosphors the monitor flickered badly, and when too many characters were on the screen it would dim as the earlier lines would get harder to read, hence the dim room lighting. The monitor appeared to be some contraption rigged up by the EE department (which CS was just a part of). After that, I would continue to occasionally run into commercial monitors that were amber, although most used green phosphors or white like the ADM-3 family and the DEC-VT100 [1]. Notably, I had access to the University of Illinois PLATO time sharing system in 1979. It used monochrome touch screen amber plasma display terminals at that time [2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-3A [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)