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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

What is the style of UI used in that device and why did it have that characteristic angular look? I’ve seen it on other devices of the same vintage.

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Do you maybe mean a vector monitor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor

It's a vector display, similar to how an oscilloscope display works. Check out the Vectrex video game console for another great example.

It’s a vector display.

Perhaps one of the most widespread device that used a vector display was the original Asteroids arcade game.

There’s a functioning machine at the Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco (at least there was last time I went there), I can’t help but stare at it (and give a mini display history lesson to friends) every time I go. Those lines are just so crisp and bright and beautiful.

The style is an artifact/limitation of using a vector display.

Compare to today’s ubiquity of a raster display. Why did they choose to use a vector display? Maybe to decrease cost and avoid placing framebuffer memory? Maybe rendering maps directly to a vector display could be faster by skipping a rasterization process? Any other reason?

Maps are intrinsically vector data, and a raster graphics display back then would have been low-res, 320x240 at most, making the map (and text!) really difficult to read. And then you’d need the rasterizer itself, using precious CPU cycles and memory bandwidth to turn perfect mathematical line segments into crude pixelated approximations. And yes, the memory needed for the framebuffer was also likely an issue. The question is more, why would they ever have used a raster monitor? None of the advantages of raster were applicable, and the disadvantages were all relevant in their use case. The 100% obvious choice was vector.

All true.

> None of the advantages of raster were applicable

Colour might have been nice though.

Atari's Star Wars had a colour vector display two years before the Etak was released.

I believe a vector CRT could be color just like a raster CRT can, using three phosphors and three electron beams (sure, technically that would’ve made the monitor a vector-raster hybrid). That would’ve raised the cost even higher, which I assume was the main reason the system was monochrome. Sure, you couldn’t easily render filled geometry with a vector display, but it wouldn’t have been anywhere near feasible with a raster monitor either given the puny hardware.

I think a vector display makes it easier to rotate the map.

I love the look. They’ll be vector displays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_monitor

Yeah, it's always so cool looking. The device is using a CRT vector display, so instead of the CRT drawing each pixel row line by line, each shape on the screen is drawn one by one as small line segments. Curves are also possible, but you'd have to formulate the vector shape for it, which is harder than for straight lines.

It also looks even cooler in person, as the refresh rate is also really good due to the CRTs, if there's an old arcade close with Asteroids or similar early vector games I'd really recommend going to see it.

Vector Graphics Display- you draw with lines instead of pixels.

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