Most "vintage" color?

[Keatah]

What do you believe is the most vintage phosphor color? Some say green or amber. There's also B&W and B&W with a tinge of blue. More rare colors are plasma-red and plasma-amber.

 

It's also possible to say plain old color as on a vintage color monitor or color tv. I've never heard anyone mention blue or seen it anywhere outside of an emulator or very mis-adjusted color display.

[wierd_w]

White/silver is technically the oldest, since many vintage old TV sets (from the 50s and early 60s) could be coerced into the job using an RF Modulator, especially by vintage micros. They would have been inexpensive (being obsolete) during the early rise to prominence of early home micros in the 80s.  I had such a B&W television that I picked up at a garage sale, and that I used heavily with my atari 2600 and my intellivision BITD.  (Because the folks did not approve of the color TV being used for games, rather than news or sports.) I got good enough at picking out the subtle differences in luminence that the different colors represented, that even color-oriented games were playable.

 

Standard Color (as in color TV) is a tricolor area phosphor grid, that gets illuminated in some degree of partiality through a shadowmask, which partly occults the electron beam fired by the CRT. In oldschool white-phosphor, there is no such trick. The screen is mostly uniform coated in the phosphor material, and just the scan interruptions produce the image.

 

In terms of actual PC Monitors though, Green phosphor is probably the contender. Amber needed to have a baseline set in order to hold its "Easier on eyes for eyestrain" claim over green.

 

I personally have a preference for white, and dislike amber.

 

Plasma screens I found to be the worst combination of "orange" and "garish bright".

 

 

[jhd]

 

The very first computer that I ever used (in elementary school) was the Model III. Thus I am strongly nostalgic for the bluish-white phosphors that system used.

 

I never used a green monitor, and I only had an amber monitor briefly in the 1990s (it came with the gift of a vintage PC).

 

 

[boxpressed]

Green for me. Commodore PET in middle school, IBM PC XT in high school.

[Keatah]

When it comes to vintage calculators of the mid-1970's they have vacuum tube displays featuring the same color phosphor as the CRTs of the era. If the color is amber or green.

[atarilovesyou]

For me, it's green. 

[JamesD]

Most vintage has to be white.  Green came later, and would be second, though my first monitor was amber.

[BassGuitari]

Well, I think most of the early dedicated monitors were white. I think of stuff like the IBM 5100, Sol-20, Apple-1, COSMAC, PET 2001, and TRS-80, which all were typically outfitted with white phosphor monitors (I know PETs also had green monitors early on). Early Apple IIs and II Pluses were probably hooked up to white phosphor screens when they weren't hooked up to TVs via an RF modulator. And of course there were the various video terminals which usually had white phosphor screens. Arcade games too, if those count, going all the way back to Computer Space and Pong.

 

I don't think green screens caught on until around 1980, when they were standard in subsequent editions of the PET/CBM systems, and Apple finally introduced their own monitors and went with green. IBM certainly played a role as well. I don't know if amber was really a factor until slightly later.

 

My personal favorite for 286 systems and the Apple //c is amber. For just about everything else in my collection besides TRS-80 Model I and Model II (and I guess Timex 1000), color is kind of a no-brainer. I do have a little 9" white phosphor monitor that's perfect with my Apple II+, though, and I pair my //e with a Monitor //e green screen. But when I think of the "vintagest of the vintage," I think of white phosphor screens.

[bluejay]

I'd say green. No, it's not the oldest, and no, it's not the prettiest, but it is the most iconic. I mean, when you imagine an ibm pc or an apple ii green phosphor is the first thing that comes into mind. Well at least mine at least.