Amber Monitors (2020)

I felt a wave of nostalgia at the title and the first photograph, so I was shocked to read the conclusion that “No one really misses amber monitors today”.

When I was an undergraduate in the mid '90s, my college had a row of terminals linked to the central university computer (which I think was a DEC Alpha). Most of them were green, but one was amber. That was my favourite, which I always used if I could. I liked the softness of it, compared to the harsh green.

So yes, I do miss amber monitors today. And as with all nostalgia, I suppose what I really miss is being young and discovering new worlds in the machine, but the particularity of the amber terminal resonates more strongly than I realised until I felt myself bristle at that curt dismissal.

Love the amber. They were comfortable on the eyes. Nothing remotely blue about them, so maybe "night mode" before it was cool.

In the mid/late 90s, I could find surplus Wyse serial terminals, mostly amber, some green, for $50-$100 in great shape. Every PC had a serial port but feasible dual-monitor setups weren't a thing yet. At more than one game studio, we'd run our debug printfs over serial to the amber screen while the game ran fullscreen. And at least one debugger could be configured to interact via serial for breaks, steps, and dumps. Fantastically productive. For the time.

Romantically or productively, to this day, the first config I make on a new terminal app is amber on black colour scheme. My heart glows amber. P3 phosphor forever.

I recall toward the end of the amber monitor period, that "white" monitors came into vogue. These were similar to the amber monitors but used white phosphors instead of the amber ones. We sold a lot of them made by Wyse. They looked cleaner and more "modern" compared to the older green and amber monitors. They could do graphics but were mainly used as text terminals.

Not long after that, larger grayscale monitors became popular for desktop publishing. they were often used in a portrait orientation and had higher resolution than the older terminal-style monitors.

By the early 90's full color monitors were cheap enough that they started to replace all of the monochrome and grayscale monitors.

Lots of technical and historical mistakes in this one :/ Amber was an option for way more than three years in the late 80s!

By the time I was old enough to use computers, these were almost extinct. I don't have any particular nostalgia for them, but nonetheless, I've set all my terminal windows to amber-on-black with the VGA DOS font.

RGB #FFB000 (255, 176, 0)

Nouveau IBM https://www.fontpalace.com/font-details/Nouveau+IBM/

The neat thing about monochrome monitors is that lacking color subpixels, text is (chiefs kiss) crisp. I have a vt420 and wow does the text look good on it.

These are still alive in a way; even though it runs on Windows now Amber screens are still all over the place in banks and trading floors thanks to Bloomberg keeping the same colour scheme they had on hardware terminal back in the day.

Back in the early 80's, I've always preferred amber monitor over all others and I couldn't explain why. The green monitor was popular, especially with IBM PC and Apple, and white/monochrome with TRS-80. But when looking at the amber monitor, it felt easier on my eyes and the text felt crisper and cleaner. Now these days, I look for one on Ebay hoping to find one (not just amber, but any monochrome crt) for a reasonable price, but so far, they are rare.

A new kind of preservation issue: image generation AIs don't know what an amber monitor is. DallE and SD both get it confused with monitor lizards, women named Amber, and things made of amber.

I have recently discovered that the MAME emulator can faithfully host a DEC vt240 terminal, and route the rs232 to a socket.

I wish that I had known this before we blew a huge amount of cash on terminal emulation for our VAX. The worst was Reflections, which is over $500/seat (we didn't pay this much).

MAME's vt240 isn't amber, but it is free.

...and I still have some amber HP 700/92 terminals on our elderly PA-RISC HP-UX.

I recall Toshiba shipped a plasma display laptop in the late 80s / early 90s that was almost red in color. That was a lovely machine, especially — as my elders remind me — because it was used for field work in poorly lit cabins at dusk, where the red had that nocturnal tactical vibe. This was in the era of maglites with red lens filters, after all!

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

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

Amber was good but I preferred the flicker-free long-persistence green phosphor (P39) like on the IBM monitor. It had a lot of ghosting but was easy on the eyes. The article is wrong, though. The green in a color monitor is generally a different phosphor from mono monitors which were based on oscilloscopes originally.

Studies supposedly showed that amber was easier on the eyes but I often found it a little dim. Computer users of the time, like 911 operators, often worked in darkened rooms to see the screens better.

Cool-Retro-Term gives a fun approximation of an amber CRT.

https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

I remember having an amber monitor. The resolution was significantly better, so we put up with the lack of color.

Switch MacOS Terminal "Homebrew" from green to orange (the amber one), fix the highlight, and switch the cursor to whichever is most nostalgic. Also set font to e.g. Andale Mono and window to something like 132x80. Make this your default.

Tada, amber from the 80s. Among the first changes I make on a new Mac.

I associate amber monitors with three things:

* DEC terminals at my school, all our grades and stuff lived in a VAX and the office personnel accessed it through VT220s or maybe VT320s

* the InfoTrac at the public library, late 80s early 90s. This was a search engine for newspaper and magazine articles that you could find in the microfiche section of the library. It basically consisted of a PC -- maybe XT or AT class with the entire search database on wonderful new things known as CD-ROMs. Text mode only, the amber monochrome monitor was hella stupid burned-in.

* one time my dad set up a Northgate 386 for his company with Xenix on it and it had an amber monochrome monitor.

Wow this takes me back! I remember hanging out in the Pasadena Public library as a kid using these amber terminals to look up info in the digital card catalog. I would play around with them for hours on end.

> The age of the amber monitor lasted from about 1987 until 1990

No, it was longer. Earlier in the 80s until later in the 90s (for dumb terminals)

> Color monitors dropped in price quickly (…)

It wasn't so much about the price, but the picture quality. (Monochrome CRTs do not require shadow masks, but color CRTs do – and were therefor blurry. E.g., dithered color often blended into perfect renditions of the color in question. Well, there was also Trintron, but this is another story.) Also, consumer graphics cards were (originally) mostly for monochrome video, and color often required a dedicated card, as did a graphics mode, which both came at the cost of lower text resolution. (Eventually, these options merged into more general cards, but mode-specific restrictions remained.) Windows may have played a role, though, as it was then all about graphics mode (and color), anyway.

Also, I recall white phosphor as the least favorable option, for its contrast that was considered too high.

The Bloomberg Terminal still has amber-on-black text as the default for a lot of its content, presumably to mimic the original amber displays they used in the 80s. The funny thing is a lot of people just associate that color scheme with the Terminal now, not realizing that it used to be common for monitors back then.

> The world seems to have forgotten about amber monitors. Believe it or not, it’s hard to even find a picture of one in action

What, really? I had a ton of them growing up.

I've got an amber VT220 dumb terminal within arms reach and I have at least one amber CGA display in storage - the Packard Bell monitor I used with my Epson 286 as a kid.

In places I've worked it wasn't uncommon to see the occasional Wyse, VT-100, Lear Siegler, or other dumb terminal that had a brightness control modified by a simple, taped-on, tinted report cover from the office supply cabinet.

Loved the amber and the green CRTs, but there were some really bad color choices too, like blue on (washed-out) white LCD, and some laptop (Toshiba?) that was red on black. Which I guess is great for dark mode.

> 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.

In the early days I used green monitors. Then I ran across the Amber ones, and I said "wow, cool", but it was not life changing. I saw the amber monitors after I left the company was working at with the green ones.

But, between the green and amber (before I left), I got a 286 PC as a workstation to connect to the mini. Its monochrome monitor was white text with a very slight blue tinge. I thought that was the best :)

Also at the time I had one of those covers that increased contrast, it attached right to the monitor (no tape).

The amber was a newer Dec unit, at my work. the greens were Vt100 class and the amber was a vt220/240 -So the primary drive here was that it was a less flickery, cleaner (less pizza stained) keyboard and faster unit.

Personally I think green is fine. I never felt 2nd class using the green or grey/white units like the ADM5/ADM3A.

Using a decwriter demanded a bit more thought. I think my coding style got worse when I stopped having to plan my intent inside my head a bit more.

My first computer, Olivetti M24sp had a beautiful amber monitor. I don't have that anymore, but I have an IBM 5155, it also has a beautiful amber monitor, and there's something magic about staring into that dark-brown void and seeing that golden light shine back at you, very calming and pleasing to the eye, at the same time sharp and crisp, and soft.

Are gruvbox[1] themes paying homage to these amber monitors? I've never seen these before but it immediately reminds me of Gruvbox colors.

[1] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/67771985/119880097...

Pretty sure the first monitor on my first PC (~1988) was amber, later replaced by black and white that did not "smear" as much so was better for games, and later replaced by a color one (that might have been on a newer PC).

My first computer had an amber monitor. With a Wang keyboard. And a turbo button.

I tried this experiment on myself and just couldn't stare at amber display for long. Green is the best. Naturally bright for humans, not cold, not hot, a bit calming, not alarming.

One thing I remember about the amber monitors was that the persistence was longer, so they didn't flicker as much as the green ones. My first PC had a Zenith amber display for that reason.

My first PC had an Hercules Graphics Card with Amber monitor.

After seeing my friends' CGA PCs I marvelled at the "high resolution".

Fond memories of WordStar and XTree in Amber :)

I got used to amber monitors in the early 90s to this day my default Bash terminal mimics the amber on black look. I love it.

I had one. It was high res Hercules I think. Loved it.