For those veteran linux people, what was it like back in 90s? I did see and hear of Unix systems being available for use but I did not see much apart from old versions of Debian in use.
Were they prominent in education like universities? Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time compared to the business needs of 98, 95 and classic mac?
I ask this because I found out that some PC games I owned were apparently also on Linux even in CD format from a firm named Loki.
Hearing your monitor squeal when you got the modelines wrong was fun.
Could you please elaborate? I’ve no idea what that sentence means, so it sounds really wild to me 😅
Back when CRT monitors were a thing and all this fancy plug’n’play technology wasn’t around you had modelines on your configuration files which told the system what kind of resolutions and refresh rates your actual hardware could support. And if you put wrong values there your analog and dumb monitor would just try to eat them as is with wildly different results. Most of the time it resulted just in a blank screen but other times the monitor would literally squeal when it attempted to push components well over their limits. And in extreme cases with older monitors it could actually physically break your hardware. And everything was expensive back then.
Fun times.
Oh, fun indeed 😄. Thanks!
CRT monitors internally use an electron gun which just fires electrons at the phosporous screen (from, the back, obviously, and the whole assembly is one big vacuum chamber with the phosporous screen at the front and the electron gun at the back) using magnets to twist the eletcron stream left/right and up/down.
In practice the way it was used was to point it to the start of a line were it would start moving to the other side, then after a few clock ticks start sending the line data and then after as many clock ticks as there were points on the line, stop for a few ticks and then swipe it to the start of the next line (and there was a wait period for this too).
Back in those days, when configuring X you actually configured all this in a text file, low level (literally the clock frequency, total lines, total points per line, empty lines before sending data - top of the screen - and after sending data as well as OFF ticks from start of line before sending data and after sending data) for each resolution you wanted to have.
All this let you defined your own resolutions and even shift the whole image horizontally or vertically to your hearts content (well, there were limitations on things like the min and max supported clock frequency of the monitor and such). All that freedom also meant that you could exceed the capabilities of the monitor and even break it.
Sounds pretty cool, thanks for sharing!
Squreeee