> The story goes that when the Bloomberg terminal was created in the early 80s all the consoles where monochrome, and the only choices were green or orange (on black in both cases, of course).
It's probably not entirely true given there were dozens of known phosphors, and there were monochrome displays in other colors (e.g. the 1980 Apple Monitor III was available in green and white).
However assuming they went with pretty standard equipments green was by far the most common followed by amber. Amber is also somewhat softer on the eyes, which might have been an argument in favour given they'd have folks looking at these displays all day long, especially for charts which would fill the terminal with <color>: green monitors were OK when you had mostly black (text, curses interfaces) but it was way too harsh otherwise.
Our first computer actually had both green and amber displays, the amber display was dedicated for games and the like, anything which would light up a significant fraction of the display at once would go to the smaller amber monitor instead of the larger green one.
It's probably not entirely true given there were dozens of known phosphors, and there were monochrome displays in other colors (e.g. the 1980 Apple Monitor III was available in green and white).
However assuming they went with pretty standard equipments green was by far the most common followed by amber. Amber is also somewhat softer on the eyes, which might have been an argument in favour given they'd have folks looking at these displays all day long, especially for charts which would fill the terminal with <color>: green monitors were OK when you had mostly black (text, curses interfaces) but it was way too harsh otherwise.
Our first computer actually had both green and amber displays, the amber display was dedicated for games and the like, anything which would light up a significant fraction of the display at once would go to the smaller amber monitor instead of the larger green one.