Timeline for Why do PCs boot in 720x400 resolution?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
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| May 18, 2020 at 23:20 | history | edited | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 18, 2020 at 20:12 | history | edited | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 18, 2020 at 20:12 | comment | added | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | OK. FYI, I am fully in favor of the collaborative nature of Stackexchange - i.e., unless something is contrary to my statements (which your comments are not) there is nothing wrong with editing it yourself. | |
| May 18, 2020 at 19:44 | comment | added | Michael Karcher | I used to be annoyed as child by the 60Hz flicker during daylight in a 50Hz country, so it definitely was not an AC interference thing. But the amount of flicker depends very much on the phosphor type, and my first VGA monitor definitely was on the cheap end of the spectrum. May I suggest to change the last sentence to "This resolution fully utilized the capabilites of the VGA monitor at 70Hz, and finally brought the horizontal resolution of MDA text to color monitors"? It's not that 400 and 480 lines are just "close enough" - those are dedicated different modes of the monitor. | |
| May 18, 2020 at 19:34 | comment | added | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | In my experience, the problem with 60Hz refresh was often related to interaction with fluorescent lighting. In a dark room, a 60Hz monitor was fine :-) I didn't mean 400 out of 480 was bad, rather that it was good compared to 350 (of MDA) and it fit real well in terms of a x16 character cell. There just wasn't any need to go all the way to 480 since most text software would never use more rows at the time and graphics got the 480 anyway. | |
| May 18, 2020 at 19:09 | comment | added | Michael Karcher | I don't like the last sentence. It sounds like the text mode did not make full use of the 480 lines, which could be considered a bad thing. Actually, it is a good thing! The VGA monitor has a fixed horizontal frequency, so more lines means lower refresh rate. At 400 lines, it ran at 70 Hz, and at 480 lines, the refresh rate dropped to 60 Hz, which was flickery back in the time on many contemporary monitors. The 350-line EGA compatible mode ran at 70 Hz too (with longer blanking), because there was no need for higher refrehs rates at that time. | |
| May 18, 2020 at 13:51 | history | edited | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 18, 2020 at 2:45 | history | answered | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | CC BY-SA 4.0 |