DOS Days – Laptop Displays

Re:DOS Days – Laptop Displays by iamnothere on Thursday November 20, 2025 @08:45AM (#45992471)

I wish large greyscale LCDs were more available. Since the decline of monochrome LCDs, it’s very hard to find these cheaply. I miss both the PDA aesthetic and the low power consumption, and the e-ink ghosting issue is much worse, so it isn’t a great substitute.

LCDs were indestructible as long as you didn’t leave them out in extremely hot or cold weather.

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Re:DOS Days – Laptop Displays by leejoramo on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:15AM (#45994238)

My all time favorite laptop was the 1994 Apple PowerBook DUO 280 with active greyscale screen. These screens actually looked the best in direct sunlight with no backlighting

The battery life was listed as 2-4 hours. Normally it was under 3 hours. However, with no backlighting and booting a stripped down Mac OS and apps off a RAM disk, I could get close to 6 hours in BBedit or WriteNow. I would spin up the HD to save data and turn it off again.

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_duo/specs/mac_p...

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Re:DOS Days – Laptop Displays by AlanYx on Thursday November 20, 2025 @09:26AM (#45992888)

My favorite display era was the short-lived period of 4-bit greyscale X-terms. Just enough shades of grey to be usable, few distractions.

There are a lot of greyscale radiology monitors available in the used market these days, but they tend to have a relatively high white point and aren't easy on the eyes.

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Re:DOS Days – Laptop Displays by XenophileJKO on Friday November 21, 2025 @12:41AM (#46001581)

I still have nostalgia for my Hercules monochrome adapter with an amber screen.

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Re:DOS Days – Laptop Displays by lproven on Friday November 21, 2025 @08:13AM (#46004200)

Agreed.

I have good colour and stereo vision, but I'm very shortsighted. I'm also nearly 60 and now wear varifocals with 3 focal lengths for books and phones, computers, and distance.

But 1980s long-persistence-phosphor CRTs looked good to me, were restful to my eyes, and I could and did look at them all day.

On today's flatscreens I can't see the difference between SD and HD, let alone on a TV across the room where it's imperceptible. I can't tell different refresh rates apart, let alone variable ones. I read excited product releases about tear-free video and fixing things I never was able to perceive in the first place and so which did not need fixing.

Now I am losing my choice of good X11 desktops with rich standards-driven keyboard UIs, replaced by phonelike toy desktops which take 10x the RAM and 100x the CPU and GPU and require a whole new display server, and which can't do nine-tenths of the stuff I used in desktops 15 years ago.

Apparently, because of kids with keen eyes who see things I never could.

I suspect all this stuff about HDR and VRR and gamer screens that refresh at 100s of Hertz are just the same as audiophiles who pay absurd sums for gold-plated 100Mb Ethernet cables.

I want to see double-blinded randomised controlled trials to prove that these people can see what they claim to see -- because I don't believe them -- and to prove to them that the bulk of the population can't tell.

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Re:DOS Days – Laptop Displays by kjs3 on Friday November 21, 2025 @12:09PM (#46006362)

I was sold on greyscale (2-bit) on the NeXT. I ran many NCD Xterminals back in the day, and the greyscale ones were awfully nice.

I do have a radiology setup I use for writing sometimes, but yeah it's not a general purpose solution. I didn't think about it being the white point so thanks for pointing that out.

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