Worth remembering that these displays were small. The Radius or PERQ display was the same format as a piece of paper. It was "full page" only for 8.5x11, in the same way that 35mm camera sensors are "full frame". If you have a 21" or larger WUXGA display you already have 2 of these pages side by side and there aren't a lot of great reasons to run a display like that in portrait mode. Unless you are just dying to have realistic 11x17" pages, large portrait monitors are just an ergonomic problem.
Around '92 I was working for a software house that was having a clear out, and picked up a radius pivot monitor and graphics card, and added it to my Mac IIcx. The Mac was already old and slow by that time, but I was running Emagic Logic for music composition and midi sequencing, and adding the second display to the machine transformed it into a really awesome tool.
Rotating the monitor and the desktop reorientated, which felt magical at the time. Very clever tech, and lovely integration into the OS.
The monitor was B&W and I seem to remember the card supported 16 grey levels, not sure if it was maxed out with RAM, sometimes you had the option of adding RAM to cards to increase the colour pallette.
Happy times.
The combination of font and some ClearType shenanigans produced this amusing result: https://postimg.cc/4KDDLr9Y
I like how if you tap any of the images it transforms from an Atkinson dithered image to a a clear colour image. Cool effect.
Vertical screens are fantastic, they feel natural for so many coding tasks. I bought one for home and adaptation took less than a week. Now have a hard time going back to horizontal when working from the office. Recommended!
The pixel checkerboard pattern on the page's background paired with smooth scrolling on an LCD display can unfortunately result in some distracting flashing afterimages.
Perhaps the issue could be reduced by using `background-attachment: fixed` and changing the element that has the pattern to be the <body> tag, so that the background is fixed on the browser's viewport?
When I was in 6th grade I would get released from class 15 minutes early and was charged with changing the litter and feeding the school cat. This only took 5-10 minutes, tops. So I'd spend the last few minutes of each day in the librarian's office playing tetris on one of these displays.
Hm. Got one like these gifted around 2003, or so. But in color. Got it to work with some adapter dongle with dip-switches, and a hand-crafted Xorg-modeline, attached to a Spea-Mercury (S3) in a PCI-slot in some OC'ed Athlon with 1.5GB (Virtual Channel)RAM.
Was more of a 'can-do!' gimmick though, because said Athlon already powered some later 3DFX-Voodoo3 attached to an 21" Hitachi Superscreensomething (Trinitron equivalent without the wires!) at 1600x1200@80Hz(which gave 2 full pages next to each other(at least in fullscreen without additional UI)), and some 17" attached to a midrange Matrox.
Mostly under NetBSD and KDE3.x, but Gentoo ran too.
I had one of these in the early 90s when I was doing DTP work--with FrameMaker. I think at that time the price had dropped to somewhere around $800 or so? It was still an investment. But totally worth it. I remember seeing the two-page and color versions at Seybold, but they were way over my budget. People bitch about the cost of GPUs now, but it seems like nothing compared to what you could spend on a decent prepress setup in those days. (though I guess now the equivalent would be the kind of high-end systems used by video and special-effects producers)
OMG I wanted one of these so bad back when. I was a poor student, however, so that was a no go. I also remember there having been a "Two Page Display".
I can't work out if it's my eyes, but I see vertical stripes of yellow/green and blue/purple in the text for some reason. Is this some weird optical illusion?
man this site really hits that nostalgia.
the computer business used to have a lot more diversity of small vendors trying all kinds of crazy things.
it was a mess but it was fun to watch and dream.
> Radius was the only player in this nascent market who could actually both screens at the same time
(?)
Anyone guess the missing word(s)?
The radius display was great, but the two-page displays really rocked.
Around 1987/88, I was finishing college and worked at a copy/print/desktop publishing business. We had, IIRC, Mac SE 30s with Radius full page displays and several laser printers (in addition to high volume duplexing copiers and a deal with a full print shop for larger runs).
Adobe PageMaker and Illustrator were the workhorses. I did the design and layout for newsletters, posters, business cards, menus, invitations, resumes, or whatever someone wanted.
The real kludge was the scanner we had on the Macs. It replaced the print head on an ImageWriter II dot matrix printer. You fed it what you wanted to scan and it “printed” over it, scanning it at 72 dpi, which wouldn’t pick up much detail. So we would blow up images on the copier, scan the large pictures, trace it into an EPS file in Illustrator, then use it for the client’s materials.
My speciality was turning Polaroid photos of gas stations/convenience stores into architectural style line drawings for a firm that did graphics and signage. Photo -> blow up on copier -> scan in multiple parts into grainy BW scans -> tile the pieces back together -> trace in Illustrator. They would then take my 11”x17” black and white line drawings and their designer would color them and introduce the proposed graphics. As time consuming as it was, it saved them money to hire us to do it and the results were pretty impressive - particularly since my artistic skills were minimal.