[vcf-midatlantic] Old Video Game Advertisements - musing on 80 column TV

[Douglas Crawford]

On 8/8/2022 4:09 PM, Ethan O'Toole via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
>>  Can you imagine how differently the industry would've evolved if 
>> common, standard TVs had the bandwidth to handle 80-column text readably?
>>          -Dave
> 
> I think it might have given the TV-as-a-monitor a little bit more life, 
> but once people started going GUI they would have still switched to 
> higher resolution displays.
My early computer use would have been dramatically changed from 1983 to
1986-ish when I first had 80 columns on an Amiga.
40 columns stunted my work for sure!
(Let alone 1981 with 20 column VIC 20! Ouch)
But us poor 8 bitter guys persevered.
The 1977 computers that started depended on TVs, if they
had be able to do 80 columns, probably would have changed a lot
with respect to adoption by the public as more viable spreadsheet and
word processing application runners. And hobby software people would 
have been able to compose proper lines of code and comments. Might have 
sped up the pace of advancement of their work.
I guess that 64 and 80 column text on CP/M helped those systems
excel at dawn of the microcomputer. Even the tiny monitor on the Osborne 
1 had 80 column with clever pan-scan feature.
TRS-80 I & III even started 64 columns which was probably an advantage 
for them.  Wonder how they wangled the bandwidth for clear 64 char text 
on their alleged TV monitor?

> 
> I guess here in modern times it feels like all TVs are just computer 
> monitors.

Yes they pretty much are!

> 
>              - Ethan
>