Yes, in addition to that display quality today is good enough that you can have subtle contrast changes and light-on-dark text is not a mess of fuzzy, fringing pixels like in the 1970s.
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Some vector displays were really high res! I tried an original Asteroids arcade machine at an exhibition in Berlin and the detail was astonishing. (I know there was also a “raster” like use of vector displays which wasn't as detailed :–)https://youtu.be/w60sfReTsRA?t=22 …
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Replying to @rsms
QuadraScans! I love those. But I meant more the halo around lit vectors/pixels, which all arcade displays shared. In offices, I believe it was a human factors catch 22: Halo was bad for ergonomics. Removing it meant sacrificing contrast, which was… bad for ergonomics. :·)
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I’m not really an expert on display history, but I think throughout 1970s, dark-on-light text was rarely attempted because the halo would just bleed into text too much?
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Only later with Mac, maybe NeXT, and then Windows in the 1990s… and non-CRT displays, of course. We got so excited about the desktop metaphor that we haven’t seen light-on-dark much before iPhone brought it half-back in 2007, in a very different world.
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So I think part of the excitement is that to many people it does feel like a new thing! But if you put aside the marketing and excitement, I believe there are some genuine benefits…
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…and the dark modes of today, while superficially similar to command lines of 1970s and 1980s, can be done much better and with much more thoughtfulness. Not that the last part’s always there. :·)
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(I’m actually sad those vector displays disappeared. I believe they were just a maintenance nightmare, and the hollow polygon aesthetic fell out of fashion, right?
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But what’s fun is that raster displays today are good enough to emulate QuadraScans with all their imperfections even! Which is kind of fascinating.)
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Replying to @mwichary
Just realized I’m wearing my Asteroids socks today! Fun coincidence.pic.twitter.com/lNYt1hcQRy
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Replying to @mwichary
I played it so much as a kid (some knock-off DOS shareware distributed on a floppy)
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Replying to @rsms
If you’re interested, every Saturday in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum they demo Space War, which is the vector predecessor to Asteroids. If you’re lucky, you get to play it against the guy who wrote it. :·)pic.twitter.com/ZddZXYfjkb
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