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.
You can't really replicate amber anymore. The thing about amber monitors and the others from that era, is that they were a single phosphor. Meaning, the amber was not mixed. It was a pure hue of amber with an individual pixel fully lit up.
To approximate amber now on an RGB display, you have to light up subpixels of differing values. It isn't the same because now you're mixing red and green light together.
More accurate to use just green instead because there is no light mixing with that, but it's still going to be only a subpixel and not the entire pixel. Probably easier to use silver for monochrome because then all 3 subpixels are used.
I liked amber monitors very much. They were comfortable.
I may be misunderstanding but aren’t monochrome OLED panels (which are available in various colors) comprised of single-color pixels? If so it seems like they’d be the closest possible analogue.
The bloom is highly overstated (probably due to photographs). The monitors were not very bright compared to monitors today, and since there was no shadow mask the dot was very sharp. Color monitors could have significant bloom however, depending on their quality.
What you may be thinking of is the persistence effect which is very long with the green phosphors.
A modern high resolution display (4/5k) has subpixels easily small enough to emulate the old monitors accurately in terms of color. What you can't get is the CRT curvature and the glare of the fluorescent lights bouncing off the glass.
Also, the green phosphor Apple and at least some other vendors used wasn't a pure #00FF00 green -- you'd have to light other color channels. This picture is a pretty accurate representation: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/btaokj....
I consider it to be a pure green in the sense that it was a single green phosphor used in the display. It is true that in terms of light nanometers there are different shades of green and Apple's wasn't what RGB green is, but it was a fully green pixel.
I do own this exact monitor, I should recap it one of these days. The plastic is very yellow now sadly.
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.
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.
Funny. Back in the day, early 80s, all of the terminals and displays I encountered were black and white. Early monitor for an IMSAI, the Pet, the TRS-80. ADM-3A, VT-100, Telerays.
Apple monitors started coming out in green. First non-B&W actual terminal I saw was a VT-220.
Wasn’t really until late 80s, early 90s the green and amber really started showing up everywhere. HP terminals liked amber.
There was a company that was trying to sell amber monitor for Macintoshes. This was around the same time folks were selling head mounted mice. I didn’t feel either was a particularly good idea.
The ADM-3A you mentioned predated the rest and was available in amber, green or white. I remember a few of the amber ones in my middle-school library, as well as white. I also miss the pastel case colors.
The monitor on the TRS-80 was a cannibalized black and white television. Cost was probably a big factor in using white for many of those systems.
Sure was. 720x348 if my memory isn't failing me (don't ask why I can remember such useless numbers for decades). And twice as many text columns. For a teenager into coding, it was heavenly.
I used one(ISA) as text console next to a PCI-card, next to an AGP-Card around 1996, or so. True triple head setup! With BIOS boot set to Hercules as primary. Then when XFree86 got up, the other screens lit up, too. Worked under BSD & Linux :-)
Yeah, the different memory area worked even back in the CGA-EGA-VGA days - you could run some software that took advantage of it even in DOS - debuggers that showed debugging info on the Hercules and the "main screen" on the color.
I hooked a Hercules card and monitor up to my 486 with Linux and tinkered around. It was kind of cool to be able to draw graphics on a second amber (or was it green) monitor, but I never could get 2 terminals to work. Just writing directly in Hercules memory from root.
If I recall correctly, one could also debug a DOS programs and print stuff on the Hercules while doing graphical or text UI on the regular VGA.
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 assume you looked into it, and I am misunderstanding your requirements, but if not, xterm is a very good vt220 emulator, usually better than other terminal emulators. We used the program "socat" to make a pty connected to a network socket. then you can hook xterm to the pty.
This had to be a windows app in a package. The problem with xterm is that you likely need cygwin/x or xming, and that's too much baggage.
We bought Reflections decades ago, and had hundreds of licenses, but it was telnet clear text.
On my recommendation, we pushed stunnel to all our clients, and made redundant stunnel server gateways on Linux.
Then a new boss said we needed to be on supported software, so we ended up on Bluezone Rocket. It was not Reflections, but it was not cheap.
Our VAX is already on an emulator, and I only learned that MAME would do a vt240 after googling for a free OS2200 terminal emulator (MAME uts20, not yet working).
We do have many museum pieces in my place of work. Have you ever tried to change directories in VMS? It's a long-winded ordeal.
This probably wouldn't work, because the VMS apps we are running use a bunch of the really odd modes, double size, line drawing, inside-out (kidding), but it has to be perfect.
The "invisible island" xterm guy really brags on the quality of his emulation, but it's just not a windows app.
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).
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.
I wonder if there'd be a market for amber LCD panels these days - the aesthetics of the past with the manufacturing ease, durability and technology of the present.
Heck maybe you can put it on-board as a color option in the OSD. (yes I know this is all possible with software like xrandr and redshift, thanks - having it done on the display side might give different results)
I don't know if it needs to be amber, I mean I like amber, I set my terminal emulators to use a amber on black color scheme, but I don't know if it is the best. But I would like a high resolution monochrome display, there is something about not having subpixels that I think would lead to a very sharp display, good for reading stuff on. see also: eink displays
Somewhere about 15 units world-wide? Not a best opportunity..
> having it done on the display side might give different results
If you take an OLED panel with a good pre/post-processor for the text mode you can get a pretty good results, but who needs a real text mode nowadays?
But yeah, I have at least two ancient Android tablets and at least one with Windows, I would love to repurpose at least one of them as an amber display to show the status of the services.
DCI-P3 (barely) covers amber (P3), but not the green one (P1). It does cover P2, which is also green and is a more gentle green. I think it was used more for oscilloscopes than monochrome monitors.
I kinda think the functionality has been replaced, maybe reduced to e-ink displays? The contrast, the adjacent simplicity and focus involved with having one job of simply displaying textual information?
Now, amber e-ink displays, that would be really interesting to see :)
Our local library had them for a while when I was young. The Windows PCs that eventually replaced them seemed worse - they seemed okay at doing a thousand different things instead of very good at doing one thing. The amber sceen PCs were hyper-focused on searching books.
Wow, this brings back a memory that was quite heavily buried. Either in middle school or high school, we had some similar amber terminals for searching the card catalog. I appreciated at the time how much quicker it was to use those than the web-based system accessed via Windows 95 (?) desktops.
Apple’s accessibility tools bring us tantalisingly close to the amber monitor look. All we need is the already available grayscale filter, but with shades of amber rather than shades of grey. I’m sure there’s a low-level API that makes it possible…
I used to do something like that when I was developing b&w photos in my room. I changed the color balance somehow to block green and blue to have a red only display. This way I could use a timer app on the computer for developing photos. (I also had to turn the brightness of the monitor down pretty far, just the red software filter apparently wasn't enough)
When I was working on VAXen in the mid-90s, I always fought to ensure I got amber vts over the green options, to the point that for a brief while I had an amber vt240 that was total garbage (bad flyback that whined and gave me headaches every day) rather than a green vt102.
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.
Perhaps they were referring to colour monitors of the same vintage. Cheap composite monitors were terrible. Component video was much better, but also more expensive and not all systems supported it. I also seem to recall the text being fuzzier on component than on monochrome displays, but that may have been a function of the electronics or picture tubes of the monitors I had access to.
> 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.
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.
* 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.
I also had these terminals at my public library much into the later 90s and early 2000s. Now that library and the terminals are long gone. Getting old is weird!
My old hometown's public library is still there. In the front lobby is a display of some of their old card catalog cabinets and drawers. Drawers I used to find books with the Dewey Decimal System. Now displayed like relics from a forgotten civilization.
Yep I got an Amber monitor with my Franklin Apple clone December 1982. So definitely not just a few years in the late 80s. They were never common green much more widespread.
I also distinctly remember a friend of mine having an Amber monitor around that time for what I though was an Apple but could be mistaken. I was jealous, my dad had a CP/M machine with a green screen
One of my biggest findings in life has been that "history" is always "recorded" in the interests of someone or something, no exceptions. Accuracy is merely an occasional byproduct that isn't actually important.
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.
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.
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.
The plasma displays were actually awesome in person. Way better than green and amber monitors in terms of sharpness, and easier on the eyes.
They were even better than Atari and Sun station B&W monitors at the time, which were also very good. I wish there were a mostly B&W version of MacOS, where color is used only sparingly.
I believe one can coax macs into full grayscale mode via accessibility apps, and that's actually surprisingly good for focusing, although I am not quite sure why that is.
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.
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.
Now that you bring this up, I wonder if the LCARS interface from Star Trek TNG being primarily amber was inspired by Amber screens and work interfaces like those from Bloomberg Terminals.
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Nouveau IBM https://www.fontpalace.com/font-details/Nouveau+IBM/
To approximate amber now on an RGB display, you have to light up subpixels of differing values. It isn't the same because now you're mixing red and green light together.
More accurate to use just green instead because there is no light mixing with that, but it's still going to be only a subpixel and not the entire pixel. Probably easier to use silver for monochrome because then all 3 subpixels are used.
I liked amber monitors very much. They were comfortable.
What you may be thinking of is the persistence effect which is very long with the green phosphors.
Also, the green phosphor Apple and at least some other vendors used wasn't a pure #00FF00 green -- you'd have to light other color channels. This picture is a pretty accurate representation: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/btaokj....
I do own this exact monitor, I should recap it one of these days. The plastic is very yellow now sadly.
Quite a lot of phosphor formulations existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor#Standard_phosphor_typ...
https://retr0bright.com/
[1] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/67771985/119880097...
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.
Apple monitors started coming out in green. First non-B&W actual terminal I saw was a VT-220.
Wasn’t really until late 80s, early 90s the green and amber really started showing up everywhere. HP terminals liked amber.
There was a company that was trying to sell amber monitor for Macintoshes. This was around the same time folks were selling head mounted mice. I didn’t feel either was a particularly good idea.
The monitor on the TRS-80 was a cannibalized black and white television. Cost was probably a big factor in using white for many of those systems.
If I recall correctly, one could also debug a DOS programs and print stuff on the Hercules while doing graphical or text UI on the regular VGA.
They were also less fuzzy. Its not just more pixels but less fuzz.
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.
We bought Reflections decades ago, and had hundreds of licenses, but it was telnet clear text.
On my recommendation, we pushed stunnel to all our clients, and made redundant stunnel server gateways on Linux.
Then a new boss said we needed to be on supported software, so we ended up on Bluezone Rocket. It was not Reflections, but it was not cheap.
Our VAX is already on an emulator, and I only learned that MAME would do a vt240 after googling for a free OS2200 terminal emulator (MAME uts20, not yet working).
We do have many museum pieces in my place of work. Have you ever tried to change directories in VMS? It's a long-winded ordeal.
So it's pretty cheap to make a terminal from an old monitor, ps/2 keyboards and mice.
http://www.fabglib.org/classfabgl_1_1_terminal.html
There's also a LilyGo esp32 with all the right connectors already there for ~$12USD
https://www.tindie.com/products/lilygo/lilygo-ttgo-vga-v14-c...
The "invisible island" xterm guy really brags on the quality of his emulation, but it's just not a windows app.
I still have a hp-ux 10.20 at home for nostalgia but not the text terminals :'(
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.
Heck maybe you can put it on-board as a color option in the OSD. (yes I know this is all possible with software like xrandr and redshift, thanks - having it done on the display side might give different results)
Somewhere about 15 units world-wide? Not a best opportunity..
> having it done on the display side might give different results
If you take an OLED panel with a good pre/post-processor for the text mode you can get a pretty good results, but who needs a real text mode nowadays?
But yeah, I have at least two ancient Android tablets and at least one with Windows, I would love to repurpose at least one of them as an amber display to show the status of the services.
Now, amber e-ink displays, that would be really interesting to see :)
Looking back now, they were probably DEC VT320s as seen in this LGR video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuZUPpmXfT0
https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
QED :)
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.
https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
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).
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.
* 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.
I do miss them, but only in the sense that if I had to pick a monochrome display for some reason it would be at the top of my list probably.
No, it was longer. Earlier in the 80s until later in the 90s (for dumb terminals)
They were even better than Atari and Sun station B&W monitors at the time, which were also very good. I wish there were a mostly B&W version of MacOS, where color is used only sparingly.
I believe one can coax macs into full grayscale mode via accessibility apps, and that's actually surprisingly good for focusing, although I am not quite sure why that is.