Comment by DanBC
8 years ago
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.
8 years ago
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.