Next Previous Contents 8. A real color terminal can change the color of the text and background to many different colors while a monochrome terminal can only change the brightness of a fixed color. However, changing the brightness, etc. gives a lot of possibilities. Some words can be black on a light grey background while other are highlighted by black on white. In addition there is white on black, underlining, and blinking.
Color works like the color on a computer monitor or TV screen.
Monochrome has inherently better resolution since it doesn't depend on dots permanently fixed on the screen. For text terminals the only use of color is to differentiate text and this advantage is not always worth the cost of worse resolution. Thus monochrome may be better since it also costs less. For dual sessions the terminal has two serial ports of equal status. Each port is connected to a serial port on a different computer.