And I had to get to 2560x1440 before I felt like I really had enough room for more than one window at a usable size and placement at the same time. (Not really surprising, as it's finally big enough to put 1280x720 windows next to each other.)
It is all relative. Someone who grew up in a tiny apartment may consider an average-sized house spacious, someone who grew up in a mansion may consider it cramped.
When all I had was 640x480, it didn't feel cramped, because it was all I knew. And then 800x600 came along, and "wow this is huge". And now I start Windows 3.1 in a VM, and "I don't remember it being this small?"
When I was a little kid, I thought our house and backyard were enormous. Then my parents sold that house and we moved to another city, and I haven't been inside it for over 30 years now. I bet if I went back tomorrow, it would look a lot smaller than I remember it being
It was like when we jumped from software rendering 3D at 320x200 unfiltered textures struggling to get to 30FPS to 3D accelerated 640x480 at 60FPS... WOW! We don't see those kind of jumps much any more but you do cherish them when they turn up.
800x600 on a CRT back then really did feel as big as 1920x1080 today.
How so? CRT pixels aren't active, is that what you mean? They are still distinct picture elements ("pix-els").
Of course, that's all for horizontal lines. The number of vertical lines is actually part of the signal. It's just that there's a lot of fuzziness in how many times you can subdivide an individual line.
I've sometimes seen people on HN argue that CRTs could go as high or higher than early LCDs in resolution, but what those people never say is that those "high" resolutions looked very blurry compared to a LCD.
People only cranked up the resolution if they wanted more room to work with, not more details. Personally I was always more comfortable with the lower resolutions on such displays, plus, because of the way the tech worked, CRTs were limited in refresh rate at their peak resolution and in my opinion they were atrocious to look at if they were run at 60 hertz.
On the other hand, LCDs were very bad at showing any resolution other than native, which made them very bad for gaming as any time you needed to drop the resolution to run a game at a decent framerate you would be stuck with a blurry image. Plus, even today's high refresh rate LCDs are worse at motion than CRTs due to sample-and-hold.
All in all, it was difficult to tell whether you would like a CRT before buying it, as it wasn't well advertised how sharp the picture would look at X or Y resolution. With LCDs at least that part is not a problem. If it says it can display 4k density of pixels, that is what you get. You will still need to judge them for their viewing angle, latency, or quality of color, but detail is no longer an issue.
Also, I'm unsure as to how the monitor type would have any impact on the screen real-estate available to the OS. If the OS is rendering an 800x600 screen, then there are 800 pixels of room available horizontally and 600 vertically, no matter the screen technology.
Given a 32 pixel size of an icon for example, there's would be room for 25 icons horizontally with a 800x600 resolution but 50 icons on a 1600 resolution. The screen technology does not factor into this at all.
What I do give you that it's probably possible to drive a CRT monitor of a relatively small size with larger resolutions because pixels can be infinitely small, though, as I said in the beginning of the comment, at some point you will get issues with sharpness and things become blurry.
1280x1024 was pretty nice on early LCDs as well.
It used to be faster before they started 'scaling' the display.