Re-visit the past with a new “old monitor nostalgia” mode for your expensive high-resolution television or computer display!

The issue:

Modern computers (and TVs) have large, high-resolution screens.

But sometimes people have nostalgia for the past—perhaps yearning for Cold War-era computing, when the harsh glow of a 9-inch CRT monitor represented the pinnacle of technology (Figure 1).

***Fig. 1:*** *This* *1984 black-and-white Macintosh* *cost approximately $5500 in 2019 dollars, which will buy approximately 10 economy-priced laptops in the year 2019.*

Proposal:

Modern monitors should have an option to emulate the behavior of various old display types.

For example, a high-resolution monitor could easily pretend to be the following:

A 1950s tube television
The tiny black-and-white screen of the 1984 Macintosh (Figure 2)
The monochromatic green display of the Apple // (Figure 3)

***Fig. 2:*** *In “Mac ’84 mode,” only a tiny fraction of the screen is used (left), in order to give the user that authentic 9-inch-screen experience. (The blue area represents an unusable border region.)*

***Fig. 3:*** *Apple // mode. After a while, you actually stop noticing that the whole display is green!*

Conclusion:

Now that a “Dark Mode” theme has been implemented by nearly every operating system vendor, the next arms race is sure to be “retro display mode” or “retro CRT filter” mode.

PROS: Gives people a greater appreciation of modern technology.

CONS: May cause eyestrain.