I thought we had had green LEDs for the last 30 years. Practical Blue ones came much later. What am I missing here

Maybe I\'m missing something, but haven\'t green LEDs been around for ages? There are three on my keyboard as I type this!

Green LEDs have been around for a long time, long before the blue or UV LED, and are in common use as indicators, organic LED displays, LED displays, and in some RGB white or colour changing LED lights. They used to be of a relatively energy inefficient design, however this is definitely not the first green LED. Perhaps it is a more energy efficient design than in the past.

What? There have been green LEDs for at least TWENTY YEARS. Red ones were the first, back in the late 1960\'s. Orange, yellow and amber came soon after.
Blue LEDs weren\'t perfected until the late 1990\'s. Very early white LEDs were made by combining red green and blue diodes in a single package, often with a pair of greens to make up for their slightly lower brightness.
For the past few years white LEDs have been produced by covering a blue diode with a yellow phosphor. The combination of the visible blue light and the wavelengths emitted by the ultra-violet excited phosphor combines to produce white light.
First green LED is way off the mark. The author needed to do a whole lot more research on the subject before starting to write this article.

Is that correct? Green LEDs start as blue. I seem to recall that green LEDs were the 2nd color ever developed for LEDs, which gave us yellow LEDs. But Blue took another 25 years to be invented.

Full story here at NREL website, which may clarify some of the confusion:
http://www.nrel.gov/features/20100405_leds.html

If I memory serves, Current \'Green\' LED\'s are actually a blue led shone through a phosphor....the cheaper ones are just in a green plastic shell...

Nooooooooooooo I have been making GREEN LED\'s for at least 50 years.
Simple:
Get one diode. Paint it green. Put under light source - sunlight is best. Diode emits green light.
A green \"solar powered\" Light Emitting Diode.
Too easy.

I don\'t how they can have \'phosphor\' in a \'clear\' green LED package?
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3104292&CAWELAID=166061612

Current Green LED are just basically Tinted Green, either through phosphor or by painting it with some cheap paint.
Basically what this guy has done is create a LED that directly creates green light, so now we finally have the last colour in light development. Red was first, since its closest to the infrared spectrum which is easiest to replicate, then I think its blue then white which I think is just a extremely bright blue or sometimes extremely bright red, so now we have the green for a 3 or has they suggested a 4 colour white, which would make it allot cheaper.