Subject:
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Re: review: Radeon 7000 for BrickDraw3D, low-end Mac
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.geek
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Date:
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Wed, 17 Apr 2002 23:52:39 GMT
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Viewed:
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664 times
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In article <m2elhd6hfd.fsf@komodo.home.wards.net>,
William R Ward <bill@wards.net> wrote:
> So put a Hercules MDA video card in it! :-) (That's the old
> monochrome standard, from the days when color monitors were rare on
> PC's.)
Which one's the standard? :) The MDA was the original PC display adapter
(stood for, amazingly enough, Monochrome Display Adapter) and didn't
do graphics at all. Two color, text only, 80x25.
Hercules, on the other hand, was a different spec and did in fact allow
pixel-addressed monochrome graphics. It was pretty wildly popular even
after CGA came out, since it allowed a monstrous 720x350 or so, where CGA
was four-color 320x200.
I even have a monitor lying about that'll display TTL, but I didn't have
any ISA or VLB video cards any more.
> I've got a storage locker full of old computer crap that I'd love to
> get rid of, but I can't quite bring myself to just scrap it. Free to
> anybody who wants to pay shipping (I'm in Mountain View, CA) or if
> you're local, can just pick it up...
I've moved twice since those days... Two apartments ago, I had a walk-in
closet _full_ of this sort of stuff. 6x6 by about 3' deep, and it was
solid solid-state cruft. I didn't want to move it, so I junked it...
XT and AT class hardware, memory that shipped as DIP chips instead of
SIMM, MFM and RLL hard disks... cruft!
Last move, I gave away anything I still had that wasn't at least Pentium
Pro or faster. (that was just last year...) A friend of mine builds
PCs for the underprivleged, so it seemed to be a good cause.
And now the footnotes: As for TTL, that stands for "transistor to transistor
logic"-- effectively, digital signals. MDA, CGA, EGA, and Hercules were
"TTL" video, and the newer standard, VGA, is analog. In a world where
everyone was going from analog to digital for better quality, video
specs went the other way around. :)
I believe part of the reason Hercules got so popular was because it was
incredibly high resolution for the time (actually, the MDA signaled 720x350
to the screen as well, but you could only convince it to write text), and
the CGA cards that were often a little cheaper only did four colors at a
time in graphics mode. EGA was either not available yet, or when it did
come out, was quite expensive, but it allowed 16 color graphics at 640x350.
Yeah, I used to build and repair PCs for a living. :) I'm feeling much better
now... (Or am I?)
-JDF
--
J.D. Forinash ,-.
jd@forinash.not ( <
The more you learn, the better your luck gets. `-'
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