I gather what they are trying to say but that’s not the right way to say it.

One of my favorite little flash games is “n”, and I have lost weeks of my life there. It’s a simple, clean, almost gray scale UI, and doesn’t need more.

I remember firing up Asteroids for the first tome on my 2600… talk about disappointment. Back to the arcade I went, since back then you still could.

I still wasted a few evenings flipping the 2600 Asteroids but it just wasn’t the same literally or figuratively.

Some folks have deciphered the original code, and it’s weirder than you can imagine, as is to be expected for code that runs on a 60 year old computer…
http://gambit.mit.edu/updates/2011/11/reconstructing_the_vector_grap.php

Some nice person has put a lot of the documentation for that system online. Heck, you can even play Spacewar! on a real PDP-1 at the Computer History Museum.

The most important is that it’s a lot harder to build the hardware for a big vector display than for a big raster display. The deflection yoke coils must be wound with a few turns of fat wire, and the deflection amplifiers need to move many amperes of current through those coils. Winding deflection coils is tricky, as they wrap around the tube neck and funnel. I would be surprised if more than three companies ever did that successfully.

Given the exotic hardware, there would have to be a compelling business case to spend that money on it. By the waning days of CRTs, RAM was so cheap that raster CRT displays were limited by the tube’s electron beam width rather than RAM storage space. So there was no value proposition for a vector display.

Architecturally, a bitmapped CRT isn’t so very different from a vector one(you might run into chromatic oddness because of the arperture grille/shadow mask on a color unit); but vector tech prevailed in the early days because RAM was so expensive that an actual framebuffer was hyperexpensive crazy talk. Once that problem was solved, we moved to the conceptually and practically convenient pixel outputs; but it wasn’t until the rise of the LCD and the fall of the CRT that the possibility of ‘true’(as opposed to vector-based-but-rasterized-for-display, like SVG and fonts) vector graphics disappeared, since LCDs have an actual array of actual physical pixels that aligns much more closely and inflexibly to the conceptual array of pixels provided by the computer.

I’d have expected mod kits for a few of the more common CRT monitors or TVs that did a little creative abuse of the horizontal and vertical beam controls to get vector output to spring up once the sell-off of the CRT category made the things cheap enough to play with.