Comment by zabzonk
2 days ago
I bought a Trinitron tv a little later. It was an amazing display, and the weird thing was that I bought it (at a good discount) from the UK firm "Boots the Chemist" which used to sell all sorts of hardware. Alas, it has gone through a few owners since, and now only sells perfumes and drugs.
true story, I got my start programming by typing in two-line BASIC programs on the C64 display models in a Boots in South London. My family couldn't afford a computer at home.
10 PRINT "FART!"
20 GOTO 10
Not my finest code, I'll admit.
That was 40 years and a continent away.
I can't spot any obvious bugs in your code.
Although I would suggest adding a space after the exclamation point and a semi colon after the end of the string for a better screen filling UX.
The "chemists" (drug stores) in the US sell pantry essentials. I can't imagine buying a TV while waiting for your prescription!
Boots also used to sell home computers and games on cassette. Around 1983 it was an actual place to hang out to see the latest developments in home computing, and buy some toothpaste.
There's a small section of electronics. I'd expect them to have sold smaller, portable tvs from time to time.
I never had a trinitron TV, but I had a trinitron monitor in the late 90s. What a beast that was. Think it was like an 18 or 19” with a max res of something kinda weird like 1280x960 or something like that. If my probably faulty memory is accurate, the sweet spot was to run it at 1024x768 because that was that was the highest res it could do at >60hz, which made the crt AC flicker much less annoying.
The monitor shelf on that computer table had about a 2” sag in it after years. Think that think weighed about 80lbs.
A late 90s Trinitron would have been 4:3, so 1280x1024. I found it more important to run a trinitron at the native resolution for the shadow mask. Otherwise things got blurry and gross. A bit like using an LCD at its non-native resolution where things get unevenly stretched and squished.
I seem to remember my Sony G220 had a native resolution of 1024x768 and I could run it up around 100Hz. I think the max was 1600x1200@60Hz.
Often my maximum refresh rate was limited by my graphics card's dot clock rather than the CRT specs.
> 4:3, so 1280x1024
That’s 5:4. The correct 4:3 resolution is indeed 1280x960.
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I had a Sony CPD-G400. I almost broke my back carrying it home from the store in the box.
That thing would do 1600x1200 at about 85Hz if I remember correctly.
A couple of years ago I got my hands on a Lacie Electron 22 Blue IV. I have to say as good as my Sony was I think the Lacie crushed it. I guess that would be expected since the Lacie was made for graphic designers.
I had a Sun workstation at my first real job, and it had the 21” Trinitron. I’d never seen anything like it.
SGI with its screen here, just like in Jurassic park.
There was a Sun on the desk over with lots of SCSI stuff in a nice cabinet.
I remember those. Absolute monsters. They used a DB13W3 with proper mini coax lines for the RGB signals instead of the VGA HD15.
They weighed a ton, were painful to move and basically consumed the entirety of any desk they were set on.
I think the thing people don't appreciate is how good different resolutions looked. Every res was "native". None of that crazy non-integer scaling you get with fixed pixel displays like lcds.
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Humble brag :)