4 ms·

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

TylerE 1y ago
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.
- pm215 1y ago
  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 :)
  - alexdbird 1y ago
    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.
    - pm215 1y ago
      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...
747fulloftapes 1y ago
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.
esseph 1y ago
Humble brag :)
timc3 1y ago
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.
- esseph 1y ago
  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.

pm215 1y ago
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 :)
- alexdbird 1y ago
  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.
  - pm215 1y ago
    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...

747fulloftapes 1y ago

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.

esseph 1y ago

Humble brag :)

timc3 1y ago

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.

esseph 1y ago
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.