[CalvinBuild]

Totally. That matches how I’ve been thinking about it too: green was a “most visible per unit beam energy” choice, so you got usable contrast even when the trace/text got thin or you were operating near the limits. With a dimmer phosphor you’d just lose the signal.

Also agree on the “commodity default” point. Green was the cheap bright workhorse for a long time, and amber felt more like an option when manufacturers could justify it (and when the use case was heavier on text comfort vs max visibility). Your vector monitor anecdote is exactly the kind of real-world constraint story I was trying to get at.

And yeah, high-end scopes were a different world: once you’re optimizing instrumentation, you start paying for different phosphors/persistence/sharpness tradeoffs instead of the mass-terminal defaults.