Computer displays: New choices, new tradeoffs: Advances on several fronts let users and designers juggle lightness, brightness, and price as well as much-sought-after flatness

The most powerful computer in the world is of no use to anyone unless it can communicate the results of its calculations. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and on into the 1970s, most computers clattered out information for users on machines that were derivatives of the teletype, and many of the habits of computing born then still exist today. Since then, however, so-called soft-copy displays have become more and more prevalent, most of them in the form of cathode-ray-tube (CRT) displays - monitor screens that resemble television screens.