9 ms·
“ Gopher Protocol was created at the University of Minnesota for searching and retrieving documents. Its original design featured green text on a black backgro
by setpatchaddress 5y ago
“ Gopher Protocol was created at the University of Minnesota for searching and retrieving documents. Its original design featured green text on a black background.”
Yeah. All you need to know about this article.
- nsxwolf 5y agoGosh I could have sworn I remember it being amber text on a black background.
- KingOfCoders 5y agoThe VTs I've used on VMS were amber.
- anonymousiam 5y agoProbably a VT220. IIRC those had amber screen phosphor. The VT100 had white.
- daveslash 5y agoYeah, I think the point that @setpatchaddress was trying to make was that the author is confusing the color of the monitor itself with the color prescribed by the software. Thus, take the accuracy of the entire article with a big grain of salt. That's how I understood the comment.... Monochrome monitors were often either green or amber or white. If the monitor used P1 Phosphor, then it was green, P3 Phosphor was amber, and P4 Phosphor was white. So the color of the text on the screen was a reflection of the hardware spec/design, not of the software.
- setpatchaddress 5y agoIndeed, apologies for being terse. I suspect @nsxwolf understood that, though.
- daveslash 5y agoRe>> "I suspect @nsxwolf understood that, though." You're probably right. I still struggle with tone sometimes. I'm still getting used to this whole "Internet" thing... ;-)
- timw4mail 5y agoSo what color was P2 Phosphor?
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoBlue-green. Check standard phosphor types section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor
- daveslash 5y agoMy first response was ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -- but I dug some more and found out that P2 is a Blue-Green color used in oscilloscopes, but it doesn't look like monochrome computer monitors were ever made for it though [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor#Standard_phosphor_types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor#Standard_phosphor_typ...
- duskwuff 5y agoP2 was a long persistence phosphor. It was used in analog oscilloscopes because those couldn't be refreshed -- the waveform was drawn onto the display as it was received, and the phosphor was responsible for making that visible. You wouldn't want that in a computer monitor. The computer is perfectly capable of refreshing the monitor, and the long duration of the phosphor would make anything rapidly changing (like a scrolling display) impossible to read because all of the previous contents would interfere with the current image.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoStorage tube monitors did use long persistence phosphors. They were a way to simplify the refresh and memory requirements on early hardware.
- akiselev 5y agoBlue-green. It was used mostly only in oscilloscopes [1] because the persistence time was really long - good for instruments where the signal might be changing faster than a human can perceive not so much for low latency inputs. [1] https://www.wellenkino.de/565/565-1.jpg https://www.wellenkino.de/565/565-1.jpg
- dhosek 5y agoThere were also monochrome flat-panel displays, either LCD or plasma. My first¹ computer was a 25Mhz 386 lunchbox luggable with a plasma (amber) display. It was portable-ish and ran on AC power only. --- 1. Well really my second. The first was a Spectravideo computer I got for writing demo programs for the midwest distributor when I was in high school. It wasn't very useful though.
- bluedino 5y agoHow did you end up with that for a first computer?
- CydeWeys 5y agoSomething similar was the first computer I used too. My answer would.be: My dad bought it. This was a common form factor for personal computers back then, and they were sold in stores to to the general public.
- dhosek 5y agoAt the time I periodically travelled to give LaTeX workshops. I wanted something that I could set up in my hotel room to be able to work on course prep. Laptops were much more expensive and this came out to be competitive, if not cheaper than buying a desktop plus monitor.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- BulgarianIdiot 5y agoAnd while we're on the topic. Why the hell were our monochrome displays not all white. What's the purpose of adding a color.
- tyingq 5y agoGreen phosphor coating was cheaper and had a longer "glow" time so it worked better on lower refresh rate equipment. Why they weren't all white later, once that all mattered less, is a good question. I do know that HP charged us more for the white ones...that never changed.
- daveslash 5y agoI wonder..."once that all mattered less".... I wonder if, by the time that white CRTs were cheap enough, if color CRTs were also cheap enough (albeit, more expensive than white monochrome), that most consumers just said "f-it, for an extra X, I can have full color instead of _just_ white?"
- tyingq 5y agoI'm sure that was true for PCs, but for dumb terminals, there weren't that many that supported anything other than monochrome.
- michaelcampbell 5y agoI was "that guy" during those days and insisted on buying a monochrome CRT (which at that time was just a CRT, since your only choice WAS which "chrome" you chose for your monochrome) whose text was kind of pastel white. It was glorious.
- city41 5y agoI also found noting the Linux kernel's color schemes as rather odd.
- cpach 5y agoSame here, considering that there were lots of prior art for white text on black background.
- fsiefken 5y agoYes, now that you mention it. MS-DOS 5.0 (which predated the first Linux release a few months in 1991) had a nice grey text on blue background for EDIT.COM (or was it exe?) and QBASIC.EXE. and NC.EXE (Norton Commander). Netscape and Mosaic inverted this color scheme with a grey background and blue hyperlinked text. COINCIDENCE? PERHAPS NOT! I grew up with MS-DOS and 4M of RAM, perhaps I should make a tiny VM with Windows 3.11 and Netscape to revisit these days and try to get my Jekyll blog running on it (served from CERN httpd or the popular webserver at the time). Not sure if VirtualBox virtual network adapter can be recognized by Windows 3.11. Perhaps someone can backport a Gemini browser to Windows 3.11.. perhaps someone can backport a modern WWW browser to Windows 3.11! edit: someone provided VM's already! Just 33M for DOS622+WIN311 (but still a lot of floppies). I disabled the default USB support and the startup to GUI is ~5s. EDIT.COM has a "hypertext" links in it consisting of 2 little green arrows, 1 triangle rotated left on the left side and 1 right on the right side. The grey on black text is not underlined. http://virtualdiskimages.weebly.com/virtualbox.html http://virtualdiskimages.weebly.com/virtualbox.html
- zabatuvajdka 5y agoI think the article is more of a musing than a mathematical proof… I mean who has the time to deep dive into 100% historical accuracy of these things. I thought it was a neat look at a historical context of something mundane like a hyperlink.
- Hublium 5y agoThe whole thing felt like "intern from high school searches for 'old computer screenshots' with Google Image Search and comment on what they found".
- zabatuvajdka 5y agoHence the musing… when you muse about something you want to keep it loose exploration no?
- allturtles 5y agoNo one has time to bother caring about the past, and we should be grateful that someone half-assed it (at best)? I strongly disagree with this premise, there are plenty of people out there taking the past seriously and "full-assing" it.
- zabatuvajdka 5y agoI’m not trivializing history just calling out all the pundits who armchair complain about people’s good-natured blog posts.
- theodric 5y agoSomeone purportedly writing authoritatively for an audience. You don't get to just invent history out of whole cloth because you "don't have time." If you don't have time to write a factual article, you don't have time to write an article. So now this piece of crap is out there on the internet for the rest of time, permanently memorializing completely nonfactual statements. Fake news. Literal definition of. Wonderful.