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> X to run involved real risk. Get some of the parameters wrong and you could destroy your monitor.

The flexibility also allowed you to accomplish neat things.

I was spoiled by high res 21" workstation monitors at school, so my laptop with a 640 x 480 screen was very limiting. But, telling X that the LCD was a multiscan monitor made every other scan line go to /dev/null-- the effect was a pseudo-resolution of 640x960 with scrunched up, but very readable fonts. Ran that setup for years.

That was still a thing in 1998, when I got saddled with supporting the Slack boxes. Perspiration!

Same here for RH 5.1 in ‘98. I spent most of a summer messing around with trying to get the proper video modes working on my graphics card and learning the ins and outs of X configuration. Then came the sound card…