<P> Before the development of practical electronic TV, there were patents on mechanically scanned color systems as early as 1889 in Russia . The color TV pioneer John Logie Baird demonstrated the world's first RGB color transmission in 1928, and also the world's first color broadcast in 1938, in London . In his experiments, scanning and display were done mechanically by spinning colorized wheels . </P> <P> The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) began an experimental RGB field - sequential color system in 1940 . Images were scanned electrically, but the system still used a moving part: the transparent RGB color wheel rotating at above 1,200 rpm in synchronism with the vertical scan . The camera and the cathode - ray tube (CRT) were both monochromatic . Color was provided by color wheels in the camera and the receiver . More recently, color wheels have been used in field - sequential projection TV receivers based on the Texas Instruments monochrome DLP imager . </P> <P> The modern RGB shadow mask technology for color CRT displays was patented by Werner Flechsig in Germany in 1938 . </P> <P> Early personal computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as those from Apple, Atari and Commodore, did not use RGB as their main method to manage colors, but rather composite video . IBM introduced a 16 - color scheme (four bits--one bit each for red, green, blue, and intensity) with the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) for its first IBM PC (1981), later improved with the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) in 1984 . The first manufacturer of a truecolor graphic card for PCs (the TARGA) was Truevision in 1987, but it was not until the arrival of the Video Graphics Array (VGA) in 1987 that RGB became popular, mainly due to the analog signals in the connection between the adapter and the monitor which allowed a very wide range of RGB colors . Actually, it had to wait a few more years because the original VGA cards were palette - driven just like EGA, although with more freedom than VGA, but because the VGA connectors were analogue, later variants of VGA (made by various manufacturers under the informal name Super VGA) eventually added truecolor . In 1992, magazines heavily advertised truecolor Super VGA hardware . </P>

____ is the percentage of black or white added to a main color