Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

nsxwolf·

I had a Sun workstation at my first real job, and it had the 21” Trinitron. I’d never seen anything like it.

View on HN

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.

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 :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com