[gweinberg]

I think it's more because printers (used to) print going down. I don;t see why it would matter in the least that crts draw the top first, if that is indeed the case. But for old printers where the paper is continuous, down is "forward" and there is no going back.

[taeric]

I think the printers and the old monitors reason are basically the same? Scanlines used to be a "you have now to set this pixel, if you missed it, you get next scan." It is an oddly accurate mental model to think of the screen as printing an image every scan.