When a PPOE got its first five XT clones, management insisted on CGA
because they were dazzled by the colour graphics. Before long, they
exchanged the CGA cards and monitors for monochrome gear so the
secretaries could get some decent work done - except for the one machine
used by the engineers, who actually needed the graphics.
Those were the days, when crisp text and colour graphics were either/or,
you couldn’t get both in one (without spending lots of money, anyway).
Remember IBM’s own PC monochrome display adaptor wouldn’t do graphics at
all? This left a gap in the market that Hercules was only too glad to
fill.
When I got a Macintosh II, it took a few more months, but I also got the
legendary Apple 13” (later relabelled ‘14”’, measured the same way every
other company was doing it) colour monitor. This was described as the
first colour monitor that was so good, you could use it in monochrome and
not notice it could do colour.
This was built around a Sony Trinitron CRT, which had the cylindrical
cross-section rather than the more usual spherical one for CRTs. This
reduced reflections from overhead office lighting. Some people gleefully
pointed out the little wire that ran across the screen about a third of
the way up (or down), to stabilize the shadow mask, as some kind of
imperfection; it never really bothered me.
And then Zenith went one better, with its “FTM” (“Flat Tension Mask”),
which I think was the first truly flat CRT. I never used one, but I read
reviews that said it gave the illusion of being concave rather than flat,
perhaps because people were so used to convex screens at the time.