CRT monitors were expensive-both to manufacture and to control it was easier to have a computer spit out crude ASCII text than to worry about anti-aliasing and other niceties that modern computerists take for granted. Terminals had CRT monitors built-in, so users could sit at a terminal in their office to interact directly with the mainframe. They were unique from the teletype machines (which is why we still have /dev/tty devices in Linux today) that were often used to issue commands remotely. Historically, Unix terminals were literally that: physical points at the literal endpoint (termination) of a shared computer system where users could type in commands. Modern systems usually default to at least xterm-256color, but if you try to add color to your terminal without success, you should check your TERM setting. This article demonstrates how you can make Linux as colorful (or as monochromatic) as you want. Either way, the nostalgic green or amber text on a black screen is wholly optional. You can add color to your Linux terminal using special ANSI encoding settings, either dynamically in a terminal command or in configuration files, or you can use ready-made themes in your terminal emulator.
A guide to building a video game with Python.
