When I started university in 1981, I wrote all my papers and assignments either by hand or on a typewriter. By the time I finished grad school, I was using Microsoft Word on a Mac Plus. I liked being able to easily make changes to the doc, but I found one huge negative: with the word processor I couldn't see as much of the document while I was writing. With paper, I could set several pages on the desk and refer to them frequently with quick glances. With the word processor, I could see only a few paragraphs and switching between pages was distracting.

I noticed that this had a big effect on the flow of documents I wrote. I found it was much more difficult to construct a long chain of reasoning without being able to easily review at a glance what I had previously written. Same applies when writing software: it's a lot easier to write coherent code if you can see more context.

Displays eventually got better, but in my view, 1600x1200 is just barely tolerable. 1920x1200 is a big step up when writing text, since it nearly two full pages can be put on the screen, but displaying three or four pages would make a huge difference and is really what I want.

1920x1080 isn't the same thing at all: the 1080 vertical pixels just aren't enough to display a full page vertically. I would much rather work on a 1600x1200 monitor than 1920x1080.