> But there was a reason green screens and especially amber/yellow displays were popular long after color displays came out
Yes; monochrome monitors were typically higher resolution and color adapters could usually handle only very few simultaneous colors, providing very little benefit for the tradeoff of resolution.
IBM MDA (1981, monochrome text-only) was 80×25 text with a 9×14 font, or 720×348.
IBM CGA (also 1981) had 320×200 4-color graphics, and 640×200 monochrome graphics, with at most 80×25 8×8 text.
Hercules InGraphic (1982) had the same text mode as MDA plus 720×348 monochrome graphics.
IBM EGA (1984) highest resolution mode on a color monitor was 640×350.
It wasn't until VGA (1987) that there was a common PC color adapter that could drive a color monitor at or above the resolution of MDA text and Hercules graphics.
So, yeah, there was a good reason that monochrome (either alone or alongside a color display) hung around in the PC world.
>>It wasn't until VGA (1987)...
Personally, I didn't know anyone doing graphics on them. They were for pure text usages: programming, point-of-sale, etc. I think that's the reason they eventually died out: It wasn't people were giving them up, it was the home market taking off and people wanting color for games, photo editing, etc. People that worked on computers all day, were still using and loving their amber displays.
I was still using amber Wyse terminals well into the 2000s...Its like the old joke: Would you rather have a Wyse display or a 3270 keyboard ?
> Personally, I didn't know anyone doing graphics on them. They were for pure text usages: programming, point-of-sale, etc
Sure, and it wasn't until VGA that color displays could match MDA text quality, in theory, with the right display. But even then they were much more expensive.
Yes; monochrome monitors were typically higher resolution and color adapters could usually handle only very few simultaneous colors, providing very little benefit for the tradeoff of resolution.
IBM MDA (1981, monochrome text-only) was 80×25 text with a 9×14 font, or 720×348.
IBM CGA (also 1981) had 320×200 4-color graphics, and 640×200 monochrome graphics, with at most 80×25 8×8 text.
Hercules InGraphic (1982) had the same text mode as MDA plus 720×348 monochrome graphics.
IBM EGA (1984) highest resolution mode on a color monitor was 640×350.
It wasn't until VGA (1987) that there was a common PC color adapter that could drive a color monitor at or above the resolution of MDA text and Hercules graphics.
So, yeah, there was a good reason that monochrome (either alone or alongside a color display) hung around in the PC world.