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Comment by badc0ffee | Hacker News Reader

I think it's just that monitors were so much more expensive then, especially those capable of the 350-line EGA mode.

As I recall, some years later than this (referencing EGA monitors from the 80s), a 14 inch 1024x768 capable 75 Hz capable SVGA monitor with a reasonable dot pitch of 0.28, nothing special, something you might find bundled with a 386DX/40 or similar from a clone builder was something like $400 in 1992.

This would be the inflation adjusted equivalent of $970 today.

So basically like buying a really nice super high refresh rate 32" gaming display.

Apparently the original IBM 5154 EGA monitor was $850 in 1984 dollars, or like $2800 today. Of course there were cheaper compatible monitors available shortly after that.

The first monitor I bought myself was a 17" SVGA monitor, in 1997. I think I paid $700 Canadian, but I would have paid a premium for a nice picture (I think it was a Viewsonic?).

I'm sure that was a factor. As much as certain job roles today love multi-head (I'm particularly thinking head spreadsheet users) I could still have seen it being a possibility. Certainly, multi-head for AutoCAD was "a thing" pretty early, albeit the paradigm there was one monitor for graphics and another for text.

Multihead for debugging full screen apps is/was pretty sweet. Now we just use ssh or a remote debugger. I haven't finished the video, fingers crossed that he hooked 4 joysticks for multiplayer pong.

Didn't realize how wholesome 8bit guy is, great channel.

Id soft folks were using 2 graphics cards, an EGA/VGA and an MDA one to do multihead debugging. It was possible because the two card technologies actually mapped their frame buffers onto two separate address ranges. Cool stuff.

This was the way of the first TMS34010 cards for Autocad (circa 1988). You'd have a EGA/VGA card for the host, and the graphics processor would drive the high-resolution graphics display. There were 50+ vendors with a 340 solution for the high-end, before SVGA. Later, vendors conceded to adding a VGA port integrated alongside.

In Karl Guttag's recent talk on the 34010 (VCFSW YouTube channel) he mentions being contacted by Bloomberg for their multi-up terminal. When it shipped in the early 90s, it was the first dual display system I'd seen. Wall Street later began buying 4-display Matrox cards.

Given you would have to do all the display stuff through bit math on the framebuffer I imagine interactive use would be horribly slow.

You could certainly use it to display other pages of a spreadsheet or something but I don’t think I’d want to type into a word processor that was doing it.

16-color EGA and VGA had separate bitplanes, so writing 4 monochrome images would take the same time as a single one in color.

Oh I forgot about the concept of bitplanes. Yeah that would make it easy.

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