My Monitors History

Remember alley cat on CGA?

I consider myself to be relatively new to the computing world, having been introduced to my first ever personal computer in the late 1980’s. However, that being the 80’s I can still say that I’m probably in the golden age of computer literacy. I’m old enough to remember the rise in popularity of computers in our day-to-day living, and yet still young enough to have experienced technology grow along with me. And I’m likely to be at the stage when I’ll be among the movers and shakers of the technology world in the near future.

Quarter-life crisis, anyone? Nah. I’ll take a quarter-life opportunity to review what I’ve thought of technology these short years of my stay on this world so far, in terms of monitors.

My first computer was an IBM PC XT clone, with a monitor that displayed any color as long as it was green. I believe that time it was called the Hercules graphics adapter. One could display a cool 80 x 25 screen of text of about 720 x 350 resolution. Wow, wasn’t that advanced for its time, in terms of resolution? Sadly, though, the Hercules was only 1-bit, meaning each pixel is either on or off. Or you could only see green or black.

Then came the CGA monitors for me, or the Color Graphics Adapter. Games were now cool to play, with the CGA’s ability to render sixteen colors. The Hercules and CGA graphics cards actually came out at approximately the same time. The CGA was, well, colored. But the Hercules cards had higher resolution. Why did we have to have this tradeoff back then, huh?

History would say that the next logical steps in progression would be the EGA. But the next computer I got my hands on had already supported SVGA, and then a few years after, XGA-graphics, which has long been considered the standard (i.e., 1024×768 resolution). By then I was already playing games that were a bit more graphics-intensive than usual, like first-person shooters and some games intended for playing over the local area network.

These days, I still continue to use the XGA-resolution on my laptop, since most laptops only support LCD resolutions of up to 1024×768 (but graphics cards could support higher resolutions when external monitors are plugged in). On my desktop, however, I’ve pretty much gotten used to Super XGA, or 1280×1024–something you can only have comfortably with monitor sizes of 17″ or higher (otherwise, everything would be so darned small). I’m still using CRT, though, and I’m hopeful my next computer purchase would include a larger LCD screen, like David’s.

Here’s a bit of information on computer display standard nomenclature I found on answers.com.

May 31st, 2006 Posted by J. Angelo Racoma in Graphics cards, Other at 9:05 pm Comment Now! »

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