Radius Full Page Display
32by32.com
32by32.com
Adobe PageMaker and Illustrator were the workhorses. I did the design and layout for newsletters, posters, business cards, menus, invitations, resumes, or whatever someone wanted.
The real kludge was the scanner we had on the Macs. It replaced the print head on an ImageWriter II dot matrix printer. You fed it what you wanted to scan and it “printed” over it, scanning it at 72 dpi, which wouldn’t pick up much detail. So we would blow up images on the copier, scan the large pictures, trace it into an EPS file in Illustrator, then use it for the client’s materials.
My speciality was turning Polaroid photos of gas stations/convenience stores into architectural style line drawings for a firm that did graphics and signage. Photo -> blow up on copier -> scan in multiple parts into grainy BW scans -> tile the pieces back together -> trace in Illustrator. They would then take my 11”x17” black and white line drawings and their designer would color them and introduce the proposed graphics. As time consuming as it was, it saved them money to hire us to do it and the results were pretty impressive - particularly since my artistic skills were minimal.
Any reason to self-host copies of something digital always make sense ;)
Rotating the monitor and the desktop reorientated, which felt magical at the time. Very clever tech, and lovely integration into the OS.
The monitor was B&W and I seem to remember the card supported 16 grey levels, not sure if it was maxed out with RAM, sometimes you had the option of adding RAM to cards to increase the colour pallette.
Happy times.
I collected odd bits into a Mac IIfx and that was an envelope pushing machine for a System 7 Mac in the early 90's.
You can make it go in waves:
let x = 0;
function move() {
const el = document.getElementById("content");
el.style.paddingLeft = x + "px";
x += 0.01;
}
setInterval(move, 10)Best of both worlds.
As it turns out, a 55” 4K OLED TV as a monitor is practically the same as two big vertical monitors side by side :)
I find it hard to believe that an idea that's resurfaced 3 times in less than 2 decades is a bad idea. Maybe it's a good idea, but not good enough to overcome peoples' internal resistance to change? Maybe it's actually such an off the wall idea that it actually creates some of that resistance?
In any case, I can't imagine anyone would want to come out with a fixed, vertical display these days, though. A rotatable display seems strictly superior in most cases, and is reasonably well supported (at least in OSX and Linux -- not sure about Windows). The only advantage a fixed display might have over a rotatable display is that perhaps a fixed display could be a smidge more compact, due to not needing the mounting and rotation hardware. But, again, these days, displays are generally pretty thin, so I'm not sure that would even make any difference.
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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
[1]: https://www.cultofmac.com/469981/today-in-apple-history-reme...
I'd say they're less popular because it's seen mostly as an oddity (if seen at all). We've adopted the mindset that screens are to be horizontal without regard for their purpose. Also, because less are produced, they are more expensive, although not prohibitively so.
A rotating screen has multiple constraints:
- needs to be firmly attached to the desk or have a heavy stand
- requires more desk space to operate than the horizontal because it goes as wide as the diagonal while it rotates
- cable management can be more difficult, especially if used as a USB hub
- OS dynamic orientation management should be ok (Windows too) but might bring occasional challenge with some apps?
Strong :+1: from me. I am typing on a 27" retina iMac with a second 27" Thunderbolt display on my right, in portrait mode thanks to a SuperMac stand that was as expensive as a cheapo LCD in its own right.
But it's fantastic for reading long PDFs and other not-readily-resizable documents, for searching through my emails and so on. Much more use than a widescreen – whose adoption was driven, not for computers or software or ergonomics or anything, but by the commodities of the scale of production of TV screens.
Most all new TVs are 32" or larger, so that's not going to widely impact what 20-27" monitor panels can benefit from. Even when smaller LCD TVs were popular, they were often 720p or 1266x768 panels, but most monitors were 1080p.
OTOH, maybe it was more of a second-order thing: people were primed from TV and movies to expect wide-format content, so monitor makers had to produce products that satisfied that; people don't like letterboxed/pillarboxed displays.
Secondly, I suspect, but do not know, that there are effects here of making big panels and then cutting smaller panels around the edge of the large one.
Perhaps the issue could be reduced by using `background-attachment: fixed` and changing the element that has the pattern to be the <body> tag, so that the background is fixed on the browser's viewport?
Was more of a 'can-do!' gimmick though, because said Athlon already powered some later 3DFX-Voodoo3 attached to an 21" Hitachi Superscreensomething (Trinitron equivalent without the wires!) at 1600x1200@80Hz(which gave 2 full pages next to each other(at least in fullscreen without additional UI)), and some 17" attached to a midrange Matrox.
Mostly under NetBSD and KDE3.x, but Gentoo ran too.
And I remember the Radius "full page" monitor's introduction, and even saw some in the wild a couple of times. They always seemed bizarrely fit-for-purpose, and some part of me really wanted to score one for longer than I'd like to admit -- especially once PDFs became commonplace.
But your own story just prompted me to hold an 8.5x11" piece of paper up to the 24" 16x9 display on my desk -- a display size that I've been using for well over a decade now.
To my surprise, it can display more than two 8.5x11 full-page documents at one time.
And somewhat to my disdain, I've realized that I have never once actually used it this way.
But news are bad for you, so don't do... ;-)
I wound up installing netbsd on it and running it as my router for a while.
the computer business used to have a lot more diversity of small vendors trying all kinds of crazy things.
it was a mess but it was fun to watch and dream.
(?)
Anyone guess the missing word(s)?