Important! Discussion about early computer monitors and their various colors. Why did the early home computer monitors use white on blue? The main reason was cost: doing so made it possible to repurpose an old, low-resolution black and white television or a color television for use with a computer.
As for the alternatives that used green or amber screens. These were more expensive phosphors because the equipment was more expensive to support the high horizontal resolutions of 80 columns. Due to technical complications of the video bandwidth circuitry scanning limits, slower phosphors had to be used too which caused ghosting artifacts when displaying moving objects on those monitors. Yeah, we’re talking slow on the old equipment. Not only is the software writing to the display slow, but the refresh of the display itself is slow.
20180621/https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6797/why-were-early-personal-computer-monitors-not-green
Important! Want to learn all about video circuitry timing on vintage equipment? Don Lancaster’s “TV Typewriter Cookbook” is the place to go.
Another interesting history question. How do pipes save memory on early Unix?
20180621/https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/450877/how-do-pipelines-limit-memory-usage
So, here’s where the indication that early Unix was very disk heavy comes into play. (Yes, we see much of the same notion even on modern Unix, compared to alternatives.) A pipeline is executed in a serial manner: one program is swapped into memory, executed, and the bounded buffer it reads/writes goes to disk. Then the next program is swapped into memory, overwriting the previous one, and the process continues.
This is another interesting retro question, interesting why/how it is being asked. Why did it take so long for PCs to be able to shut themselves off? Basically, segmentation, fragmentation, no clear party defining the standard of the PC market, and even the computing world not knowing the future of computing at the time.
20180621/https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6780/its-now-safe-to-turn-off-your-computer