Comment by eterm
8 years ago
1280x1024 seems incredible for 1990, were people using those resolutions at the time?
It seems weird to think I'm reading this on a monitor with less vertical resolution than that some 27 years later.
8 years ago
1280x1024 seems incredible for 1990, were people using those resolutions at the time?
It seems weird to think I'm reading this on a monitor with less vertical resolution than that some 27 years later.
I bought an HP UNIX workstation monitor at a computer garage sale around 1995 or 1996 that had 1600x1200 (I think it could even do ~2048 but it flickered like crazy at that resolution) and I used it for years, schlepping it from house to house; it was probably about 5 years old when I got it. It was an absolute beast; weighed about 75 pounds. It required a custom cable to go from VGA to whatever weird composite plus sync connections the monitor had, and in the early days of using it, it required a hand-crafted X configuration file. And, I couldn't see BIOS or boot messages on that monitor because it didn't do the standard VGA/CGA/EGA modes (so I had a spare small monitor just for boot messages). I was excited when the boot messages started using the framebuffer device in Linux because it meant I could finally see my computer booting without a second monitor (though the BIOS messages were still invisible).
So, yeah, there were some awesome workstation monitors back then. Huge price tag, though. I seem to recall looking up what my monitor would have cost new, and it was in the multiple thousands of dollars (I got it for $25, because it had a scratched CRT, which I polished out).
Some of those HPUX monitors were gorgeous (and really freaking heavy), but the Sync on Green made them really hard to use on other machines.
I don't remember exact details, but I do vaguely recall that only some small subset of PC video cards supported the necessary output (I used a Matrox of some sort; they also made video cards for the UNIX workstation market at the time, and I guess the features just carried over to the PC cards), and it needed a pretty expensive custom cable that cost me more than the monitor to hook it up. It was a long time ago, but I stuck with that monitor well past the point where flat panel LCD monitors were popular and affordable because it was such a beautiful, bright, clear, picture. It was huge, too, for the time. I think it was 24", but I may be misremembering...maybe 21". 4:3 displays are just a lot more surface area for the same diagonal inches.
I ended up putting it out by the road on large garbage pickup day, after failing to find someone who wanted it (even for free). I got tired of lugging it from house to house. A couple of houses and apartments with stairs were enough to convince me that it was time to go LCD. But, it was a fun problem getting it to work.
In the mid-'80s the workstation PC vendors like Sun were competing to introduce a "3M computer". The three 'M's were megabyte, megapixel, MIPS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer
In the thirty years since, we've got fifty thousand times more performance (a recent Intel desktop CPU easily does 50,000 MIPS) and sixteen thousand times more memory... But most computers barely have two megapixel screens.
Imagine describing the scene of someone running the Atom editor on a 1080p laptop to someone from the 90s who complained about Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping[1]. It would seem so odd; 8GB of ram, 4 cores running billions of instructions per second each. Also there's a terraflop scale massively parallel supercomputer with 2GB of RAM dedicated to drawing overlapping windows.
1: Backronym for "EMACS"
That's one of the reasons that I'm actually a little excited for Moore's Law coming to an end. For years it has been more economical to program quickly and somewhat wastefully, leaving many people with slower computers behind. Now the economics are changing, and the competition will be in creating the most efficient software, to everyone's benefit.
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In fairness that parallel supercomputer was built for wrangling absurd numbers of triangles before it turned out to also be good at doing small groups of rectangles.
IMHO The weird 16:9 aspect ratio really screwed us for usability. A 19" 4:3 monitor has the same height as a 23" 16:9 monitor. However I remember 1280x1024 being commonly available on games and on Windows by the time Windows 98 came out and earlier in games.
My brother had a 486 that I think I could run the game Mechwarrior 2 by Sierra at 1280x1024. The refresh rate went down to 60hz but it was doable and we didn't have a top of the line system even at the time (mid-late 90's). Here's a 1024x768 screenshot:
https://r.mprd.se/media/images/94067-Mech_Warrior_2_Mercenar...
The 1280x1024 resolution is weird though, it isn't 4:3. So everyone running it on CRTs got a stretched image. That resolution was for 17" and 19" LCDs which actually had that 5:4 aspect ratio.
But yes, 16:9 is a total abomination and it is a shame that 4:3 is completely dead. They make excellent secondary displays (and good primary displays as well).
LCDs really did us a disfavor by imposing a fixed resolution. Before LCDs there was a wide range of available resolutions for different needs.
My current CRT monitor was made in 1997 and is 1600x1200@70Hz. They existed, but were expensive. FYI, due to CRT blanking times, the dot-clock for my VGA monitor is actually slightly higher than what single-channel DVI can manage. I had to use a graphics card with a VGA port until good DP/VGA adapters became available in the past few years.
In professional circles, sure, esp. where print or graphics were involved (aka 'desktop publishing' and up)
most new home PC's likely had 640x480 or maybe 800x600.
2-3 years later, and yes for sure.
I got my second PC in 1992 or 93; it was an Acer 486 DX2/50 with 4 meg and VESA video. IIRC, the video resolution could be run up to around 1280x1024 (I'm not sure of bit depth, probably 8 bit or maybe 15 bit), but with a 14 inch CRT monitor, Windows 3.1 was not very usable (everything was so tiny, and a bit blurry); I think I used to run at 1024x768 in 16 or 24 bit depth.
Monitors were crazy expensive, though - so was video RAM or cards with a "lot" of RAM. I didn't move up to a 19 inch monitor (Sony Trinitron) until years later, when they finally became affordable to me (around $500.00 USD) - probably around 1996 or 97. I stuck with that monitor for a long while, but eventually got an LCD monitor as a "hand-down" from my work.
A lot of my later equipment came from work cast-offs; sadly that hasn't happened as much as it used to (I have this perverse liking of cast-off hardware). Virtually all of my most recent stuff has been purchased new and assembled, though I do grab the occasional cast-off when and where possible.
Standard on SGI workstations from a very early age. Normally with a beautiful Trinitron display with the 'epic' SGI logo at the bottom, looking as cool as 'a Tesla badge on a car' but infinitely cooler.
There were two faint 'mask' lines in the Trinitron display, but other than that, the colours were every bit as amazing as today's latest AMOLED displays.
Compared to the cost of the box or even broadcast standard 'D1' monitors, the expense on a high resolution screen and the RAM to push the pixels was not a big deal.
Obviously PC's came from a different beginning. Adding on a £3000 screen was not going to happen.
If you follow workstatins back 'to Xerox PARC' they have always been super-hi res. Even Sun workstations of the 'SunTools' era were high resolution, albeit mono.
Absolutely, monitors had far greater resolution than 1280x1024, especially for creative professionals.
What you are really pointing out is that the industry sells the minimum it can to hit a price point while keeping margins.
I recall a 4kx4k vector system from HP in the 80's that was when HP was "you have to ask" you cant afford it :-)
My first PC compatible was a former CAD machine my dad's work was getting rid of. 10MB hard disk, 720x348 resolution (~2:3 pixel aspect ratio). Vertical resolution was harder due to having to accurately position the line, but horizontal resolution was limited primarily by how fast you modulate the power.
There were 1150x900 monitors in 1983: http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/symbolics/3600technic...
1280x1024 was on the low side in mid nineties. Intergraph InterView 28hd96 had a max resolution of 2048x1152 @ 80 Hz. $10K in 1997. Carmack famously coded Quake 2 on one of those.