These days, our video cards are actually as powerful as yesterday’s supercomputer and our monitors are bigger than the TVs most of us had as kids. But how did we get there? [RetroBytes] covers computer displays starting with the Colossus computer to today.
Back in the days of Colossus, of course, a display was actually a TeleType-like device printing on a roll of paper. The Manchester Baby actually had a crude display which was actually a Williams tube (no relation) that used phosphor persistence to store data. You could physically see memory on the tube or monitor it on a parallel tube — an early form of memory-mapped display.