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Retrocomputing

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    The answer to "why RGBI in 1981 instead of jumping straight to RGBHV" is probably going to be something boring like, "because memory was expensive and there wasn't a market for >16 colors that justified adding more wires to the monitor cable". Commented Jul 22, 2019 at 19:33
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    In the late 90's the "urban myth" anecdotal reason for this was given was that analog monitor cables gave off RF noise that was easily surreptitiously scooped up and read by surveillance teams, and that the same nonexistant nonpersons not responsible for not scooping up data from telecom providers in the modern era weren't responsible for not pulling strings to ensure this became standard. Commented Jul 23, 2019 at 3:32
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    I think it's more like video outputs were parallel up until DVI, when they transitioned to serial. Even RF video is parallel in signal terms: the various things are folded into different ranges of the frequency spectrum but are then all occurring at once. Commented Jul 23, 2019 at 16:20
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    @R..: I think it does, that might be why it's an urban myth that analog was problematic. rtl-sdr.com/… is a DIY tutorial / article about building a TEMPEST snooping system with software-defined radio that can snoop DVI or HDMI signal leakage. (With an antenna in the same room.) With compressed video (like digital TV broadcasts), you need to capture it near-perfectly to get anything, but monitor signals are uncompressed. Commented Jul 25, 2019 at 1:24
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    Just as a side note, some DVI ports supplied both Digital and Analog signals Commented Jul 25, 2019 at 10:56