It's an interesting paper, but I think the design decisions made here were less intentional than they seemed. The hardware producers were not making these decisions. They had CRT's and not modern LED's and made lemonade. And we were a lot younger in 1988.
Fair. The title is a bit clickbaity. The more accurate claim is: a lot of CRT choices were constraint-driven (power, heat, phosphor efficiency, flicker, tube life), and those constraints often produced more readable, lower-fatigue defaults than some modern “max brightness/high contrast” settings. What fascinated me is how often those engineering constraints ended up lining up with human biology. Also yes, being younger in 1988 probably masked a lot of strain that shows up fast now.
I get the idea that the green phosphor is easiest to see when it comes to contrast.
On the old ocilloscopes when you were getting some signals near the limit of device capability the traces could get pretty thin and hard to see sometimes.
With a less visible phosphor it might not have been possible to see anything at all at that point.
The green did seem to be a commodity for decades before the amber started becoming more common, never did prevail though.
I had two industrial monitors for non-PC's in the '80's that were vector-based and higher resolution than PC's had. Green was standard when launched, amber later became an option, and I ended up with each.
Liked them both :)
Top ocilloscope CRTs had already advanced way beyond the commodity green by then.
Totally. That matches how I’ve been thinking about it too: green was a “most visible per unit beam energy” choice, so you got usable contrast even when the trace/text got thin or you were operating near the limits. With a dimmer phosphor you’d just lose the signal.
Also agree on the “commodity default” point. Green was the cheap bright workhorse for a long time, and amber felt more like an option when manufacturers could justify it (and when the use case was heavier on text comfort vs max visibility). Your vector monitor anecdote is exactly the kind of real-world constraint story I was trying to get at.
And yeah, high-end scopes were a different world: once you’re optimizing instrumentation, you start paying for different phosphors/persistence/sharpness tradeoffs instead of the mass-terminal defaults.
