Comment by SwellJoe
8 years ago
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.