Back then what was available was scooped up and scrutinized heavily. Magazines, books, manuals, television. The Internet existed (and the web only just being developed) but really at this time most people used Lynx, Usenet, Fidonet, and BBS. There is content like this now, you just have to utilize TH-cam and find a content creator for the area you are interested in.
@@michaelmcconnell7302 Loved this stuff back in the day and watch LTT/GN pretty regularly now. You're right, same stuff, just newer. You can even draw parallels from Quick Bits to the random access file!
Performance today, yes. Quality, not so much. The build standards for modern computers/TVs and everything really, except cars have utterly collapsed. Nothing we accept today as "normal" was acceptable back then. If you bought that 37 inch monitor back then, it would still work fine today. There are very few, if any monitors built today that will work 30 years from now.
@@tarstarkusz The biggest issue with this is the speed of modern technologies today. An Apple Cinema Display or Thunderbolt Display is something like 10-18 years old depending on the model, and many work flawlessly and are built of solid quality aluminum and glass in the case of the later models, and in the case of the Thunderbolt Display it still holds up as a 2k Display with a Thunderbolt 2 hub. But people don’t want 2k, most people are spoiled by 4K, and the Studio Display at 5k for 1600$ is twice the resolution of a 4K Display, and the 6k Pro Display is 5000$. People are moving into VR now as well. So it doesn’t even make sense to make equipment of extreme quality when we see it completely outpaced in under 5 years, and sometimes obsolete in less than 10. So the speed of technology requires lower quality materials in order to keep up with demands, advancements in technology and to keep prices realistic. I had an old General Electric radio from 1945. Solid wood full sized cabinet. It just doesn’t make sense to make tech that beautiful and lasting when it will be technically outdated in a few years.
Old school technology programs were such a vibe… everything seemed so cool and we all thought the future would be amazing! Looking back I feel we have lost our innocence for technology 😢
Why? It's not like you personally had a hand in inventing any of the things you use, you were just fortunate enough to be born at the right time to purchase them.
@@blackneos940 Which tells you that technology changes, but human nature doesn't. Always going to be smug people with a false sense of superiority based on possessions.
In my lifetime of working with computers, I consider 1991 to be the year that computers started to become more interesting and capable. This episode encapsulates everything that made that so.-
I believe the main difference was due to the falling price of hard drives so it became more affordable and mainstream. Computing simply sucked when relying on floppy drives. Display cards also helped a lot too with enhanced resolutions and colors. I remember seeing a 1024x768 256 color display, flicker-free, from some PC around this time and it was like looking at something sci-fi vs older display technologies.
Neat to see monitors that supported portrait orientations were available even in 1991. They are making something of a comeback today, especially with multi-monitor setups.
It was kind of silly with a 4:3 due to the minor difference in width vs height. With widescreens it makes a big difference (e.g. watching vertical videos /s).
@@MarcoMugnatto They are rarer because software nowadays does a better job of scaling. Word can be scaled to show one page, multiple pages, etc. That wasn't the case back when this aired, there was generally little in the way of scaling, so portrait made more sense. I think nowadays they tend to be more of a secondary display rather than a primary one.
I know this is an old reply, but a place I worked at back in the mid 90s had one of these - they took it to conventions for their display booth. They had a special wooden crate/frame to have it freighted out to whatever show they went to.
oldtwins I bought a 19" pivoting LCD display back in like 1999 for $1000 & I still have it. I paid cash, so no loan for me. :) The color sucks on it because the backlight has aged, but it still works.
at "+Geforce are for n00bs and CHILDREN. I use Quadro to edit 10-bit content" well I hope they are better than those EIZO overhyped pieces of shit, why having a remote for a 24inch display just to set the brightness. And why are the colors so bad? Well good thing I am not grading on them.
NEC MultiSync were the beezneez back in the day.... There were a few highend monitor makers back then, EIZO and NEC ruled large scale shadowmask before Sony changed the game with they're Trinitron screens. EIZO licenced Trinitron technology, and IDEK/Iiyama came with they're version called Diamantron. In 1996 I worked at an ISP which used those EIZO 21" Trinitron screens. Hugely expensive in those days.
I had an Eizo monitor, the image quality was fantastic and it would happily accept an Amiga video signal, but it had a bad tendency to loudly and dramatically blow capacitors.
In around 2001 i had a 22" CRT from NEC. This was really a great monitor, but it got damaged someday by a wrong driver. After that i bought a 22" TFT EIZO monitor.
One of the most interesting episodes with the first 3d accelerator at 14:18 , 3d displays, hd displays and a video card with a dangling oscilator at 17:59, $500 video cards that don't do much and an extra $800 to go from a 15 to 17 inch crt monitor.
"Today's standards" are worse than the old standards. LCDs, which are the most commonly used type of computer monitor today, are a downgrade from CRT monitors. They caught on because they are lighter and take up less space for a given screen size, neither of which have anything to do with video display performance. Also, they are way cheaper to manufacture than CRTs, and since the manufacturers have no obligation to pass those savings onto the customers, they love the extra profits that "today's standards" bring them.
@@MaximRecoil CRTs can't have perfect geometry, can't get as bright as LCDs and the contrast ratio is awful in the real world because the screen itself is not black so any ambient light will raise the blacks, and there's no way to support variable refresh rate on tubes. Today's LCDs have wide gamut and accurate colors, high brightness and contrast for HDR, and support VRR for tear-free gaming. Tubes' only saving grace in terms of performance are motion clarity and viewing angles but even those are being matched by next gen display techs like OLED and MicroLED. The past is not all roses and rainbows like how you might have remembered.
@@DripDripDrip69 "CRTs can't have perfect geometry" They can have close-enough-to-perfect-geometry that you can't tell that it's not perfect by looking, so that's irrelevant. "can't get as bright as LCDs" You don't know what you're talking about. CRTs can get brighter than anyone would ever want to look at directly. "the contrast ratio is awful in the real world because the screen itself is not black so any ambient light will raise the blacks" Again, you don't know what you're talking about. The screen on my Dell P1230 is as black as any LCD screen. Furthermore, you don't even need a black screen for good contrast with a CRT; the contrast of old CRTs with light gray screens (which are mostly from the mid 1980s and earlier) looks fine in normal lighting. They don't look good if, e.g., the sun is shining directly on the screen, but neither does any other type of video display in existence. "and there's no way to support variable refresh rate on tubes." Everything you've said so far has established that you don't know what you're talking about, and this is no exception. "Variable refresh rate" originated on vector monitors, which use CRTs. The CRT itself does what the chassis circuitry tells it to do (and there's nothing about a CRT which prevents variable refresh rates from being implemented, obviously), and it's far more versatile than any digital display; just the fact that vector monitors exist, and can _only_ exist in CRT-based form, is a testament to this. It is 100% impossible to make a vector monitor using an LCD or any other type of digital display, because they inherently have a fixed pixel grid. "Today's LCDs have wide gamut" LOL. CRTs literally have an _infinite_ gamut. The gamut is limited only by the hardware that's sending them the video signal. The number of possible colors for an LCD or any other digital display is finite; for example, a 24-bit color display can produce exactly 256 × 256 × 256 colors, which = 16,777,216 colors. CRTs on the other hand, don't use digital steps of color; the intensity of the red, green, and blue electron guns is determined by voltage. How many possible voltages exist between say, 0 volts and 5 volts? An infinite number, obviously, which is why CRTs can generate an infinite number of colors. "high brightness and contrast for HDR, and support VRR for tear-free gaming." LOL (again). See above. "Tubes' only saving grace in terms of performance are motion clarity and viewing angles" Again, you don't know what you're talking about: - CRTs don't have a fixed pixel grid like _all_ digital displays do, so they can display a wide range of resolutions natively without the ugly scaling that you get with a digital display when it, e.g., fills a 1080p pixel grid with a 720p video. - Vector monitors can't even exist without CRTs. - CRTs can display an infinite number of colors, as I mentioned above. Digital displays inherently have a finite number of colors they can display. - CRTs display the video signal in real-time because the video signal directly drives the electron guns, so they have practically no display lag. It might take, say, 1 nanosecond for the electricity to make its way through the circuitry. On the other hand, even the "best" "gaming" digital monitors have at least 1 millisecond of display lag (and most of them have tens of milliseconds of display lag). Even 1 millisecond is an eternity compared to 1 nanosecond; it's literally a million times longer. That's why, if you go to a classic video game competition or exhibition, even today, you'll see a ton of old CRTs there; because most people don't want to put themselves at a disadvantage by using an LCD or any other type of digital display. Display lag is best avoided when you're, for example, doing a Super Mario Bros. (NES) speedrun that requires a bunch of "frame perfect" inputs in order to get a competitive time of completion. "The past is not all roses and rainbows like how you might have remembered." That would be a great point if you knew what you were talking about, but unfortunately, you've proven that you don't (see above, in many places). And I don't need to rely on memory; I still use CRTs for everything, including the PC monitor I'm using right now. It's funny that CRTs stopped being actively developed nearly 20 years ago (the industry was more than happy to move to a far-cheaper-to-manufacture display technology, with no need to pass the savings on to you, because they tricked you into thinking it was superior), and current digital displays still don't hold a candle to them in terms of performance.
Each of these computer display monitors were unique in what they could do. The only problem that I would have is that they were all beyond my price range, so that I could not afford any of them at all.
Yup, that chick from Orchid was asked a specific question and then just spat out her memorized spiel. She has absolutely no idea what the fuck they're talking about, lol.
0:30 - "Guy, come on, we're tryin'-a watch the game here! Can you go shoot your TV show intro somewhere else?" "Oh I'm sorry, did my little monologue distract you from the action-packed, blink-or-you'll-miss-it, lightning-paced excitement of this BASEBALL GAME?"
The part of this with the Radius monitor, it's 91 after they went public, where what Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith did starting in 86 with Radius and the Mac products was something that was special, especially for two individuals improving on a product they helped build, but then got forced out of Apple as things changed.
I had a 20" back in 1989 that was made by JC Penny that was a VGA Monitor, TV and entertainment deign. I paid like $200.00 in an upper class Pawn Shop one day. It still works!
yup! I recognized those pics as well. The woman was actually nude in the headshot and I did see her entire body way back in the late 1990's through one of the last BBS's that had that image.
It's weird to think how old that woman is now. She must at least be in her 50's considering I first saw that pic when I was about 15 and she was in her late 20's.
I think this is the episode where, according to Stewart, the monitor maker complained that viewers would think it was their monitor running slowly, not the video card. Who did they think watched this show?
This was back when computers did work for people, when people were in charge. Fast forward to today, the computers are effectively in charge, tracking everything, work, quantity, quality, steps, breaths, clicks, taps, trends, emotions, purchases, entertainment, desires, curiosities, problems, solutions, frustrations. People work because of computers.
13:29 reminds me of a time when I thought I'd have a side gig in graphic design. "Pantone" sought to resolve the RGB/CMYK discrepancies, if the Aldus FreeHand manual (or that of Adobe Illustrator) was anything to go by
Pantone became less relevant in that regard once home color calibration kits were released. You'd print a reference image with CMYK patterns on it from your printer, then hook up a special light meter to your monitor. It would then compare the colors on the print with the colors on the screen, then adjust the screen so it'd match your print. It then creates a profile that you could load into Photoshop, Illustrator, FreeHand, Quark, etc. Apple had it all integrated with their ColorSync system that could utilize almost any color profile generated by the various meters. You no longer needed to load color profiles on a per-app basis, everything was pretty much automatic. Pantone now charges insane amounts of money for reference swatches for matching real-world objects to their Pantone color system, and will soon (if not already) be charging money to simply view the Pantone colors within an app like Photoshop. Complete ripoff.
I remember that if you only wanted to BBS or use text-based programs and word processors, Hercules cards was the way to go. I had no idea that company also had 3D acceleration cards. It's sad their 3D cards didn't make it to the 21st century.
imagine if they integrated a camera into the monitor so it would project your face on the shiny balls that would be so cool and trippy to look at back then
I used a NEC MultiSync 4FG mid 90-ish, awesome design and great picture, only beaten by the IDEK Vision Master 17 replacing it (yes, with the backlit LCD below the bottom bezel). It was my work-horse for years and years and outperformed any LCD for at least a decade. Cons: power consumption. Pros: picture quality, speed, size demanded a large desk :-) These days the screen surface is the way we measure, back then it was volume and weight, if you could not carry you were not worthy:-)
The graphic overlays on this program seem to have been done using a Commodore Amiga with Broadcast Titler 2 from Innovision, and the AmiGen genlock from Mimelics Corporation. Remember those ? I sure do.
AlainHubert they were huge Commodore and Macintosh fans at the Computer Chronicles, but they were very fair in representing the industry at the time. Newer broadcasts are much more polished, so they may have switched to a Macintosh app for screen overlays.
22:32 My high school had a few huge RGB monitor setups like this in the early to mid 90's to run educational software packages from OS/2 2.1 on a multimedia series PS/2 (486 DLC I think) with the program's video content on Laser Disc. Too bad we only ever used it 2 or 3 times in class. I was the official "unpaid" IT student so I got to play around with it after class. Well..look at that 26:42...there ya go.
14:18 only 957 triangles? That looks like there is some Tessellation going on with subsurface smoothing. Is that only the video quality or was that already a thing in 1991?
Wow, though it's an NEC, I own a CRT that cost about ten grand back then. Yet it runs almost every arcade game out there at native resolution perfectly. Funny they never mention it could run low-resolution timings below VGA.
People always rave about Gary Kildall and Stewart Cheifet and rightly so, but Jan Lewis is just as awesome as those guys! OK well not as awesome as Kildall (R.I.P), but still.
Yeah but 1280x1024 in 1991 on a 37 inch monitor no one else at the time had near 1080p resolution on their monitors but today it does look ridiculous that huge CRT , imagine having to move house with that LMAO
grafics art of a 1991 computer, now my phone can do more then this old computers of the 90's I remeber using those computers of the 90's, the good old days, man I feall old.
Did Computer Chronicles ever cover video projectors? Those were a thing as well back then, but they were really expensive. Only some big corporations and such could afford them, I guess.
hevad Hehe. That was somewhat funny, but it probably would have been better if the narrator guy just found out why they used K. If I recall correctly, the K is the initial for Key, as the black plate in printing used to be called the key plate and Illustrations, diagrams, cartoons and such often have a black lines called key lines defining the borders of the figures and areas of differing coloring.
Uhm - you see a ton of monitors in this episode - you should at least give a time stam which monitor you are having in mind. Usually the reason is the refresh rate but also the technique itself. CRT built the picture pixel by pixel, line by line. Usually with 50/60 Hz in that time period... starting to have 70/75 Hz monitors - which was really necessary cause below 70 Hz many users had issues with looking for hours on a monitor. Often headache or even worse came up.
@@BoothTheGrey at 16:15 two monitors being compared side by side. The rotating Windows monitor wasn't Flickering, while the Mac showed lines going up and down. I just found it interesting. I'm not a techie, by the way. Thanks for explaining to me what's going on. I believe it the guy from Radius Inc.
24,000+ colors? how is that even possible that would be 14.5 bits. i'm not sure how you would have a half a bit. unless its 15 bits and 32,768 colors. im pretty sure he meant 24 bit color with a byte per channel with 16.7 million colors
Not really - cause... there would have been no possibility to anyhow plug into any device of that time... so actually... you would have a blank flat empty screen and a big claim 😀 But everybody who knew you were a time traveler from 30 years ahead would probably instantly believed that those huge monitors (like shown in back to the future 2) were standard now. But... they would also ask how great our non-fossile energy ressources are, how great the traffic with pure electrified cars and the fully digital driven traffic without any traffic jam, the very human-friendly cities without much noise, the standard worktimes of lower then 30 hours a week, etc etc. And when you answered that all the positive assumptions about our future are just nonsense and we are partly more backward driven then in the early 90s... they would rather sure not have believed you.
1600x1200 CRTs existed either then or shortly thereafter and video cards with enough onboard memory were available to support up to 256 colors and eventually the full 16 million by the mid 90s. I believe CRT tech made it challenging to go beyond that though. But the lust for higher resolutions was somewhat quashed by the introduction of 3D graphic cards which took some time to be able to do high resolution mode 3D that everyone wanted. Then by the early 2000s the LCD screens were commonplace so things tilted back upwards in the resolution wars.
I miss TV like this: informative, well-produced, use of proper grammar and language and useful to their viewership. Wish these shows still existed.
It does exist, it's just not on TV anymore.
Back then what was available was scooped up and scrutinized heavily. Magazines, books, manuals, television. The Internet existed (and the web only just being developed) but really at this time most people used Lynx, Usenet, Fidonet, and BBS. There is content like this now, you just have to utilize TH-cam and find a content creator for the area you are interested in.
My guy this is just linus tech tips / gamers nexus from 30 years ago
@@michaelmcconnell7302 Loved this stuff back in the day and watch LTT/GN pretty regularly now. You're right, same stuff, just newer. You can even draw parallels from Quick Bits to the random access file!
@@michaelmcconnell7302 funny that you bring up ltt, what a change in only a week or two
man everything was so dam expensive back then, we all take for granted how much performance we can get these days for such a small price.
Except (current) graphics cards :P
@@joaogoncalves1149 lol this is true
Yes, but they are still working today 😄
Performance today, yes. Quality, not so much.
The build standards for modern computers/TVs and everything really, except cars have utterly collapsed.
Nothing we accept today as "normal" was acceptable back then.
If you bought that 37 inch monitor back then, it would still work fine today. There are very few, if any monitors built today that will work 30 years from now.
@@tarstarkusz The biggest issue with this is the speed of modern technologies today. An Apple Cinema Display or Thunderbolt Display is something like 10-18 years old depending on the model, and many work flawlessly and are built of solid quality aluminum and glass in the case of the later models, and in the case of the Thunderbolt Display it still holds up as a 2k Display with a Thunderbolt 2 hub. But people don’t want 2k, most people are spoiled by 4K, and the Studio Display at 5k for 1600$ is twice the resolution of a 4K Display, and the 6k Pro Display is 5000$. People are moving into VR now as well. So it doesn’t even make sense to make equipment of extreme quality when we see it completely outpaced in under 5 years, and sometimes obsolete in less than 10. So the speed of technology requires lower quality materials in order to keep up with demands, advancements in technology and to keep prices realistic. I had an old General Electric radio from 1945. Solid wood full sized cabinet. It just doesn’t make sense to make tech that beautiful and lasting when it will be technically outdated in a few years.
Best quote "The monitor is quite affordable: 10,000 Dollars" 😉
20k in todays money
Corporation's ooh aah 37 inch monitor (price of one third of a fancy car)
"UNDER 10,000" 🤦♂
9,999@@pseudocoder78
@@VonDutchNLmore
Old school technology programs were such a vibe… everything seemed so cool and we all thought the future would be amazing! Looking back I feel we have lost our innocence for technology 😢
yeah I kind miss crt displays in a way they had their charms to them back then
I won't lie: in part I watch these to feel smug about my current tech. I'M LIVING IN YOUR FUTURE, CASSiE!
And Stewart is still with us, he got to see our future.
And 30 years later people will watch current videos about our kinds of Computers and feel smug about THEIR setups. ;)
Somebody clogged the toilet
Why? It's not like you personally had a hand in inventing any of the things you use, you were just fortunate enough to be born at the right time to purchase them.
@@blackneos940 Which tells you that technology changes, but human nature doesn't. Always going to be smug people with a false sense of superiority based on possessions.
In my lifetime of working with computers, I consider 1991 to be the year that computers started to become more interesting and capable. This episode encapsulates everything that made that so.-
90s is a very interesting decade where world started changing drastically. Russia, India, China, Germany etc opened the new chapter.
The 486 with CD-ROM my family got in 1991 or 1992 was such a massive leap forward from the mid-80s era computer we had before. Good times...
well, PC had started to catch up with AMIGA..... (1985 A1000 , 1987 A500, 1988 A2000 and 90 A3000) .....
See the affordable Amiga 500 of 1987, four channel sampled sound, very color graphics, GUI...
I believe the main difference was due to the falling price of hard drives so it became more affordable and mainstream. Computing simply sucked when relying on floppy drives. Display cards also helped a lot too with enhanced resolutions and colors. I remember seeing a 1024x768 256 color display, flicker-free, from some PC around this time and it was like looking at something sci-fi vs older display technologies.
Neat to see monitors that supported portrait orientations were available even in 1991. They are making something of a comeback today, especially with multi-monitor setups.
wait is Jan replacing Gary?
It was kind of silly with a 4:3 due to the minor difference in width vs height. With widescreens it makes a big difference (e.g. watching vertical videos /s).
It was rarer than today though
@@MarcoMugnatto They are rarer because software nowadays does a better job of scaling. Word can be scaled to show one page, multiple pages, etc. That wasn't the case back when this aired, there was generally little in the way of scaling, so portrait made more sense. I think nowadays they tend to be more of a secondary display rather than a primary one.
It's quite affordable actually, just under 10K. Affordable my ass
Well back then for say a company like Microsoft, or IBM for using in a big board room it was affordable, but your right for the average consumer.
+Erick Sitter And no one cares about that.
damn 10k is like 20k today is like buy 8k or 12k or 16k monitor lol
I know this is an old reply, but a place I worked at back in the mid 90s had one of these - they took it to conventions for their display booth. They had a special wooden crate/frame to have it freighted out to whatever show they went to.
@@SkuldChan42 freighted is not surprising: it probably weighed a ton.
anyone still paying off the bill for that 10k monitor on the original 18% interest plan?
And I thought my $2K professional SONY CRT in 1997 was an extravagant waste... that sir, takes the cake :P
oldtwins I bought a 19" pivoting LCD display back in like 1999 for $1000 & I still have it. I paid cash, so no loan for me. :) The color sucks on it because the backlight has aged, but it still works.
Non-interlaced, instant headache. Plus, 1mm pixels.
Got a 17" Sony Trinitron SF2 around 1998 and it was like $400.
Non interlaced doesnt cause headaches. low refresh rate does.
That pivoting screen in landcape mode is a perfect square, but in portrait mode it is not. I can't get my eyes around it.
i have to believe that the 4-3 ratio this was shot in squished the image on the horizontal part
Adjusted for inflation, $10000 in 1991 is equal to $19000 in 2019.
Well in 1991 everybody had really smelly farts
yeah, but that's not really how inflation works...
@@Nabeelco
Dollartimes/Inflation Calculators
Or $1.4M in 2023 😂
Watching show about 37" computer monitor.
Watching it on my 55" flat screen TV hooked into my computer.
Funny, that.
It seems Stewart was right *again* about how people want this or that..... :D He and Jan Lewis are GENIUSES....... :)
Watching in 4k 43 inch monitor
at "+Geforce are for n00bs and CHILDREN. I use Quadro to edit 10-bit content"
well I hope they are better than those EIZO overhyped pieces of shit, why having a remote for a 24inch display just to set the brightness. And why are the colors so bad? Well good thing I am not grading on them.
Imagine 30 years from now reading this comment on your 58,000" holographic display in spaaaaace
@@neverwin2518 This - it's almost like technology improves and becomes mainstream with time! Who woulda thunk it?!
If you have to say it's affordable before saying the price, it is not affordable!
These guys would have been drooling at my 49" ultrawide 4k gaming monitor.
As Graphic Technical Engineer and an Office-Manager I like Computer Chronicles as news-giver from computer-issues. Thanks and kind regards.
NEC MultiSync were the beezneez back in the day....
There were a few highend monitor makers back then, EIZO and NEC ruled large scale shadowmask before Sony changed the game with they're Trinitron screens.
EIZO licenced Trinitron technology, and IDEK/Iiyama came with they're version called Diamantron.
In 1996 I worked at an ISP which used those EIZO 21" Trinitron screens. Hugely expensive in those days.
I had an Eizo monitor, the image quality was fantastic and it would happily accept an Amiga video signal, but it had a bad tendency to loudly and dramatically blow capacitors.
In around 2001 i had a 22" CRT from NEC. This was really a great monitor, but it got damaged someday by a wrong driver.
After that i bought a 22" TFT EIZO monitor.
Still remember my 17" monitor as a teenager back in the late 90's. Loved it, and now have 2 x 4k 32" monitors, how things changed.
Back in 1989 we were paying almost $5,000 for our 19" and 21" monitors we used for desktop publishing.
500 $ for 1mb of vram , kind of puts that 1080ti into perspective
When the 1060/1070 etc. are hundreds less, not really.
nearly 10k for a 37'' 1280x1024 crt monitor in 1991, $1000 for a 75'' 3840x2160 qled flat panel monitor in 2023. Tech has changed so much in 32 years.
And that $10K in 1990 dollars is equivalent to $22,500 in today’s dollars. In other words, that monitor cost as much as a small car!
Yea, analog devices were just expensive to produce. There wasn't too much in the way of price drops until LCDs took over.
17:20 Because of LGR's review of this monitor I expected it to have a squeak when he rotated it.
One of the most interesting episodes with the first 3d accelerator at 14:18 , 3d displays, hd displays and a video card with a dangling oscilator at 17:59, $500 video cards that don't do much and an extra $800 to go from a 15 to 17 inch crt monitor.
wow how far we have come from needing a special attachment on the monitor for 3d and now we don't my how far we have come from then to now
that 3d monitor actually looked and performed pretty amazingly even for todays standards
But was likely a headache machine.
"Today's standards" are worse than the old standards. LCDs, which are the most commonly used type of computer monitor today, are a downgrade from CRT monitors. They caught on because they are lighter and take up less space for a given screen size, neither of which have anything to do with video display performance. Also, they are way cheaper to manufacture than CRTs, and since the manufacturers have no obligation to pass those savings onto the customers, they love the extra profits that "today's standards" bring them.
basically the same technology used in the more recent that were snort lived
@@MaximRecoil CRTs can't have perfect geometry, can't get as bright as LCDs and the contrast ratio is awful in the real world because the screen itself is not black so any ambient light will raise the blacks, and there's no way to support variable refresh rate on tubes. Today's LCDs have wide gamut and accurate colors, high brightness and contrast for HDR, and support VRR for tear-free gaming. Tubes' only saving grace in terms of performance are motion clarity and viewing angles but even those are being matched by next gen display techs like OLED and MicroLED. The past is not all roses and rainbows like how you might have remembered.
@@DripDripDrip69 "CRTs can't have perfect geometry"
They can have close-enough-to-perfect-geometry that you can't tell that it's not perfect by looking, so that's irrelevant.
"can't get as bright as LCDs"
You don't know what you're talking about. CRTs can get brighter than anyone would ever want to look at directly.
"the contrast ratio is awful in the real world because the screen itself is not black so any ambient light will raise the blacks"
Again, you don't know what you're talking about. The screen on my Dell P1230 is as black as any LCD screen. Furthermore, you don't even need a black screen for good contrast with a CRT; the contrast of old CRTs with light gray screens (which are mostly from the mid 1980s and earlier) looks fine in normal lighting. They don't look good if, e.g., the sun is shining directly on the screen, but neither does any other type of video display in existence.
"and there's no way to support variable refresh rate on tubes."
Everything you've said so far has established that you don't know what you're talking about, and this is no exception. "Variable refresh rate" originated on vector monitors, which use CRTs. The CRT itself does what the chassis circuitry tells it to do (and there's nothing about a CRT which prevents variable refresh rates from being implemented, obviously), and it's far more versatile than any digital display; just the fact that vector monitors exist, and can _only_ exist in CRT-based form, is a testament to this. It is 100% impossible to make a vector monitor using an LCD or any other type of digital display, because they inherently have a fixed pixel grid.
"Today's LCDs have wide gamut"
LOL. CRTs literally have an _infinite_ gamut. The gamut is limited only by the hardware that's sending them the video signal. The number of possible colors for an LCD or any other digital display is finite; for example, a 24-bit color display can produce exactly 256 × 256 × 256 colors, which = 16,777,216 colors.
CRTs on the other hand, don't use digital steps of color; the intensity of the red, green, and blue electron guns is determined by voltage. How many possible voltages exist between say, 0 volts and 5 volts? An infinite number, obviously, which is why CRTs can generate an infinite number of colors.
"high brightness and contrast for HDR, and support VRR for tear-free gaming."
LOL (again). See above.
"Tubes' only saving grace in terms of performance are motion clarity and viewing angles"
Again, you don't know what you're talking about:
- CRTs don't have a fixed pixel grid like _all_ digital displays do, so they can display a wide range of resolutions natively without the ugly scaling that you get with a digital display when it, e.g., fills a 1080p pixel grid with a 720p video.
- Vector monitors can't even exist without CRTs.
- CRTs can display an infinite number of colors, as I mentioned above. Digital displays inherently have a finite number of colors they can display.
- CRTs display the video signal in real-time because the video signal directly drives the electron guns, so they have practically no display lag. It might take, say, 1 nanosecond for the electricity to make its way through the circuitry. On the other hand, even the "best" "gaming" digital monitors have at least 1 millisecond of display lag (and most of them have tens of milliseconds of display lag). Even 1 millisecond is an eternity compared to 1 nanosecond; it's literally a million times longer. That's why, if you go to a classic video game competition or exhibition, even today, you'll see a ton of old CRTs there; because most people don't want to put themselves at a disadvantage by using an LCD or any other type of digital display. Display lag is best avoided when you're, for example, doing a Super Mario Bros. (NES) speedrun that requires a bunch of "frame perfect" inputs in order to get a competitive time of completion.
"The past is not all roses and rainbows like how you might have remembered."
That would be a great point if you knew what you were talking about, but unfortunately, you've proven that you don't (see above, in many places). And I don't need to rely on memory; I still use CRTs for everything, including the PC monitor I'm using right now.
It's funny that CRTs stopped being actively developed nearly 20 years ago (the industry was more than happy to move to a far-cheaper-to-manufacture display technology, with no need to pass the savings on to you, because they tricked you into thinking it was superior), and current digital displays still don't hold a candle to them in terms of performance.
Steve - "yeah, right... mmmh ha...."
Sales person - "most, *est, ost, *est"
computers were already so advanced in 1991. Making a lot of work easier and faster. And possible...
Each of these computer display monitors were unique in what they could do. The only problem that I would have is that they were all beyond my price range, so that I could not afford any of them at all.
You can really tell which vendor reps actually know the words they’re using, and which ones memorized phrases.
Most of the reps on here are obviously just talking suits, not engineers.
Yup, that chick from Orchid was asked a specific question and then just spat out her memorized spiel. She has absolutely no idea what the fuck they're talking about, lol.
That Mitsubishi monitor would be amazing for RGB enabled retro consoles!
0:30 - "Guy, come on, we're tryin'-a watch the game here! Can you go shoot your TV show intro somewhere else?"
"Oh I'm sorry, did my little monologue distract you from the action-packed, blink-or-you'll-miss-it, lightning-paced excitement of this BASEBALL GAME?"
Buzz so much watching these
The part of this with the Radius monitor, it's 91 after they went public, where what Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith did starting in 86 with Radius and the Mac products was something that was special, especially for two individuals improving on a product they helped build, but then got forced out of Apple as things changed.
All those people presenting theirs side edge technology display a genuine excitement so clear and alive, almost losing their breath. 😮
I had a 1MB Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 in my 486 back in the day. It was amazing!
I had a 20" back in 1989 that was made by JC Penny that was a VGA Monitor, TV and entertainment deign. I paid like $200.00 in an upper class Pawn Shop one day. It still works!
Had a 21' NEC Multisync from that time period for use with CAD. It took 2 people to pick it up and put it on a desk. Probably close to 50 pounds.
21:37 Rocking the Max Headroom look.
me watching this on my 49" curved ultrawide... wow how far we have come
Watching this on my special edition CRT iPhone.
I have my beads arranged not at random on my abacus. Don't be a hater.
@@ChatGPT1111 Those are oversized pearls dear, and nobody cares.
@@papadop Yeah, well I just received smoke signals that say otherwise! 🤣
1:49 i still having that .gif in my bbs backup archive from my teenager days... hohoo
yup! I recognized those pics as well. The woman was actually nude in the headshot and I did see her entire body way back in the late 1990's through one of the last BBS's that had that image.
It's weird to think how old that woman is now. She must at least be in her 50's considering I first saw that pic when I was about 15 and she was in her late 20's.
I think this is the episode where, according to Stewart, the monitor maker complained that viewers would think it was their monitor running slowly, not the video card.
Who did they think watched this show?
"okay maybe you don't NEED a Jumbotron for your personal computer...."
I beg to differ my good man I can see my gaming rig now.... Take that Linus.
These Jumbotron had a very low resolution. Even the typical VGA gaming resolution 320x200 of the early 90s was a higher resolution mode.
Its quite affordable, available for under 10 thousand dollars....
This was back when computers did work for people, when people were in charge. Fast forward to today, the computers are effectively in charge, tracking everything, work, quantity, quality, steps, breaths, clicks, taps, trends, emotions, purchases, entertainment, desires, curiosities, problems, solutions, frustrations. People work because of computers.
15:22 is the very definition of "shit-eating grin".
13:29 reminds me of a time when I thought I'd have a side gig in graphic design. "Pantone" sought to resolve the RGB/CMYK discrepancies, if the Aldus FreeHand manual (or that of Adobe Illustrator) was anything to go by
Pantone became less relevant in that regard once home color calibration kits were released. You'd print a reference image with CMYK patterns on it from your printer, then hook up a special light meter to your monitor. It would then compare the colors on the print with the colors on the screen, then adjust the screen so it'd match your print. It then creates a profile that you could load into Photoshop, Illustrator, FreeHand, Quark, etc.
Apple had it all integrated with their ColorSync system that could utilize almost any color profile generated by the various meters. You no longer needed to load color profiles on a per-app basis, everything was pretty much automatic.
Pantone now charges insane amounts of money for reference swatches for matching real-world objects to their Pantone color system, and will soon (if not already) be charging money to simply view the Pantone colors within an app like Photoshop. Complete ripoff.
"The monitor is quite affordable actually, it's availalble under $10,000"
4k TV's were around that when brand new in the late 2000s
I remember that if you only wanted to BBS or use text-based programs and word processors, Hercules cards was the way to go. I had no idea that company also had 3D acceleration cards. It's sad their 3D cards didn't make it to the 21st century.
imagine if they integrated a camera into the monitor so it would project your face on the shiny balls that would be so cool and trippy to look at back then
Those bezels... And, an actual mercury switch to detect rotation?
Plenty space for my post-it notes
“Why would customers need this graphics card?” 1 year later Wolfenstein 3D would be released…and the rest is history?
I'm watching this on a el-cheapo 42" 1080P TV I got for free on Craigslist as a second monitor and it works great. And I pivoted it.
Love it Stewert at Candelstick in his suit during the game.
I used a NEC MultiSync 4FG mid 90-ish, awesome design and great picture, only beaten by the IDEK Vision Master 17 replacing it (yes, with the backlit LCD below the bottom bezel). It was my work-horse for years and years and outperformed any LCD for at least a decade. Cons: power consumption. Pros: picture quality, speed, size demanded a large desk :-) These days the screen surface is the way we measure, back then it was volume and weight, if you could not carry you were not worthy:-)
The graphic overlays on this program seem to have been done using a Commodore Amiga with Broadcast Titler 2 from Innovision, and the AmiGen genlock from Mimelics Corporation. Remember those ? I sure do.
AlainHubert they were huge Commodore and Macintosh fans at the Computer Chronicles, but they were very fair in representing the industry at the time. Newer broadcasts are much more polished, so they may have switched to a Macintosh app for screen overlays.
Howzabout the episode where they showed off NewTek Video Toaster? I think v1.0 was jacked into an Amiga.
13:07 The black is referred to as K denoting key, a shorthand for the printing term key plate
14:04 Anyone has some more infor about this Hercules Superstation 3D card? It seems to be ahead of its time.
I will never for the life of me understand why someone doesn't do a show like this on satellite tv. It would make really good money.
That last monitor display was for the classes, not for the masses.
Only $10 grand lol
CRTs are so good.
Great during Cat 5 hurricanes. Your paperwork ain't going anywhere! 😂
22:32 My high school had a few huge RGB monitor setups like this in the early to mid 90's to run educational software packages from OS/2 2.1 on a multimedia series PS/2 (486 DLC I think) with the program's video content on Laser Disc. Too bad we only ever used it 2 or 3 times in class. I was the official "unpaid" IT student so I got to play around with it after class. Well..look at that 26:42...there ya go.
I can only imagine playing retro consoles, with RGB, would look like on that 37' Mitsubishi monitor. BVM eat your heart out lol.
OMG they got portrait mode display 30 years ago!!
Yes i need to replace my slide projector. Where can i buy one of these
"Raster Ops" shall be my new art studio's name.
I love how the first thing they showed on that display was a creepy clown🤡😱
Yes, take a look at this nice clown pictu AHHHH 😂
Isn't that redundant?
14:18 only 957 triangles? That looks like there is some Tessellation going on with subsurface smoothing. Is that only the video quality or was that already a thing in 1991?
Wow, though it's an NEC, I own a CRT that cost about ten grand back then. Yet it runs almost every arcade game out there at native resolution perfectly. Funny they never mention it could run low-resolution timings below VGA.
did you ever have one of those farenhieght boards for faster graphics?
People always rave about Gary Kildall and Stewart Cheifet and rightly so, but Jan Lewis is just as awesome as those guys! OK well not as awesome as Kildall (R.I.P), but still.
meh why CPM is dead been dead and never did anything at all for me atleasy Bill Gates taught me IT that's more the those two ever accomplished
Kassie Swanson's voice is an ASMR bomb.....
1:49 that must be some Playboy pic :)
i remeber that file was on everywhere
@@pyromiko You remeber?
yo recuerdo el recuerda tu recuerdas nosotros recordamos vosotros recordáis ellos recuerdan
@@pyromiko Jag vet inte vad du skriver men det är säkert nånting jättecharmigt.
@@pyromiko sii cuando te vas a toilet en año 1991... personas fueran caca cabeza.. oye que te mambo en la casa y no tengo ganas
How could I have forgotten about multisync?? Must be getting old!
Of course Stewart Cheifet wore a suit to sit in the stands at Candlestick Park for the opening shot.
3D in 1991?!! No way!
3:15 - So that’s what happened to Fuller off of Home Alone 😆
The alternating image 3d would probably work well on a CRT since pixel response time is virtually zero.
I used one of those NEC , second hand in 1996 :D
23:15 Stewart was bombarded with static electricity from that TV
God damn it can someone please upload the 4K version?! I cannot wait until October 1st!
You know you need to poop those big old grandma pants dammit!!
Love seeing the super heavy CRT monitors of yesteryear, lol
My 43" 4K IPS would have blown their minds.
Woah, you use 43" as computer screen?!
Yeah but 1280x1024 in 1991 on a 37 inch monitor no one else at the time had near 1080p resolution on their monitors but today it does look ridiculous that huge CRT , imagine having to move house with that LMAO
@@saltysoysauce954I use a 50" as a computer screen lol
grafics art of a 1991 computer, now my phone can do more then this old computers of the 90's
I remeber using those computers of the 90's, the good old days, man I feall old.
Graphics* than* remember* feel*
@@Amalekites *these
16:15 Ancient tablet
There were tablets before that
Did Computer Chronicles ever cover video projectors? Those were a thing as well back then, but they were really expensive. Only some big corporations and such could afford them, I guess.
I really want that pivot monitor really badly to play vertically oriented games.
Can you imagine the $hit $how if someone dared say "for him" for context generically as a customer today?
And those people should be ignored, as they were back then
Oh man I remember at the time that damn clown was used everywhere in slideshows to demonstrate computer displays and in magazine ads.
how stoned is this guy ....15:47
multitasking at 640x480 Those were hard times
Windows was only fun at a resolution of 1024x768 and better. And this took a little more years for the average user.
I’m surprised that massive monitor couldn’t sync at 1600px
"For some reason they use the K for black instead of B" LOL!
hevad "B" for blue.
hevad Hehe. That was somewhat funny, but it probably would have been better if the narrator guy just found out why they used K.
If I recall correctly, the K is the initial for Key, as the black plate in printing used to be called the key plate and Illustrations, diagrams, cartoons and such often have a black lines called key lines defining the borders of the figures and areas of differing coloring.
Ts6451 "K is the initial for Key"
Interesting.
hevad For some reason the triple K (KKK) doesn't like black LOL
RonJohn63 "B for blue"
Interesting.
Paid $720 for 17" Iiyama Vision Master Pro 410. It was a great deal, since MSRP was over $1000
Jesus Herman Christ ! buying computers back then was like buying a car!
TestTubeBabySpy actually, worse. You could buy a new Toyota for like $4500 back then.
The prices of these computer devices were so painful. That Mitsubishi 32' monitor was about $10.000. Oouch
Computing up to about the late 90s was pretty painful if you were poor.
I can remember plasma TVs from 2002 going for about $9000. Cheaper but still painful
"640x480 Resolution. You don't see that on many portable computers." no we don't not anymore.
Why does the monitor on the left flicker and the other one doesn't?
Uhm - you see a ton of monitors in this episode - you should at least give a time stam which monitor you are having in mind.
Usually the reason is the refresh rate but also the technique itself. CRT built the picture pixel by pixel, line by line. Usually with 50/60 Hz in that time period... starting to have 70/75 Hz monitors - which was really necessary cause below 70 Hz many users had issues with looking for hours on a monitor. Often headache or even worse came up.
@@BoothTheGrey at 16:15 two monitors being compared side by side. The rotating Windows monitor wasn't Flickering, while the Mac showed lines going up and down. I just found it interesting. I'm not a techie, by the way. Thanks for explaining to me what's going on. I believe it the guy from Radius Inc.
Stefan’s shirt is fire
Omg these prices back then🥴
14:20 immortal teapot
24,000+ colors? how is that even possible that would be 14.5 bits. i'm not sure how you would have a half a bit. unless its 15 bits and 32,768 colors. im pretty sure he meant 24 bit color with a byte per channel with 16.7 million colors
I could watch this shit all day
Max headroom presenting the biggest monitor ever.......
Show an 8k display to someone in 1991 and they would think you were an alien from another planet
Not really - cause... there would have been no possibility to anyhow plug into any device of that time... so actually... you would have a blank flat empty screen and a big claim 😀
But everybody who knew you were a time traveler from 30 years ahead would probably instantly believed that those huge monitors (like shown in back to the future 2) were standard now.
But... they would also ask how great our non-fossile energy ressources are, how great the traffic with pure electrified cars and the fully digital driven traffic without any traffic jam, the very human-friendly cities without much noise, the standard worktimes of lower then 30 hours a week, etc etc.
And when you answered that all the positive assumptions about our future are just nonsense and we are partly more backward driven then in the early 90s... they would rather sure not have believed you.
1600x1200 CRTs existed either then or shortly thereafter and video cards with enough onboard memory were available to support up to 256 colors and eventually the full 16 million by the mid 90s. I believe CRT tech made it challenging to go beyond that though. But the lust for higher resolutions was somewhat quashed by the introduction of 3D graphic cards which took some time to be able to do high resolution mode 3D that everyone wanted. Then by the early 2000s the LCD screens were commonplace so things tilted back upwards in the resolution wars.
A portal!
The guy with the Binoculars at the beginning just isn't giving a fsck..... :D