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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

That’s true, but for some reason, in mid-1990s operating systems, the step up from 1024x768 was usually 1280x1024.

Maybe there was a popular professional monitor at some point that was 5:4 and had this resolution?

Many of the first popular LCD monitors were 17" or 19" 5:4 1280x1024.

But that came after 1280x1024 had already been a popular resolution for a decade.

What was the original 5:4 CRT that gave us this resolution?

There isn't one. Running a non 4:3 CRT mode simply resulted in a change in aspect ratio. However, by adjusting the geometry in the settings menu get to something closer to the aspect ratio by using the marginal areas of the tube. Pincushion will be a bit worse, but who cares,

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.

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.

The older Sun monitors were fixed frequency (not multisync like a typical PC CRT monitor), so you only got one resolution, it couldn't sync to anything else :)

I had a couple of these over the years. I ended up using specialist graphics cards to use them with a PC. The crude scaling built into the cards made old PC games and NES games gloriously blocky, on top of the gorgeous colours and blacks.

I used a SparcStation 2 as an X terminal for several years in the late 1990s, having picked it up free as a student. Eventually PC monitors and my budget improved to the point that I retired it, but it was massively better than the cheap 14" CRT I had on my PC at the time.

I did have to contribute floating point emulation support to the Linux sparc32 kernel code, as otherwise the X server would occasionally crash when it hit a denormal number in the font rendering...

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.

Humble brag :)

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 was lucky enough to get access to an SGI Indigo2 IMPACT 10000 in about 97 or 98 due to a fluke auction buy my highschool did on computers at the time. It was amazing. They bought this big lot of Dell PCs and somehow ended up with it.

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