Amber computer displays
Jun. 2nd, 2025 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcBefore I graduated, I did a bit of freelance IT consulting. Over thirty years ago now, one of my jobs was to migrate a legal practice from their old Wang business system to a modern PC/Windows-based system. Following the rule that older computer stuff tends to be better, the Wang system was rather nice to use, I got to dig into it in working out what data they had there and how to extract it: I would bring that data home on 5¼" floppies and do some transformation to it before ingesting it into the new system.
The practice's main book-keeper had a computer with a display that was really lovely to read. It was amber, and crisp enough that I surmise it probably used real P3 phosphor, not just some colour setting. Given how much of what I do remains largely text-based, I wonder if I might appreciate there being some system now that I could buy that is basically such a display with some wired way to plug in a keyboard and serial networking so it can run as a text-based terminal client of a modern Linux system, or even just plug it straight in as some monochrome monitor for which we still have some ancient driver code in Linux.
The practice's main book-keeper had a computer with a display that was really lovely to read. It was amber, and crisp enough that I surmise it probably used real P3 phosphor, not just some colour setting. Given how much of what I do remains largely text-based, I wonder if I might appreciate there being some system now that I could buy that is basically such a display with some wired way to plug in a keyboard and serial networking so it can run as a text-based terminal client of a modern Linux system, or even just plug it straight in as some monochrome monitor for which we still have some ancient driver code in Linux.
