Thursday, January 30, 2003 |
19:16 - It was a simpler time
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...Or perhaps a more complex one. Depends on how you look at it. Either way, it's just a memory now. And when you run across a relic from that time, as with so many dim memories, all you remember is the good.
This is a video adapter that let you use PC monitors (with standard VGA connectors) on a Mac, whose video connectors had several more pins than VGA's fifteen.
This adapter has a DIP switch, which allowed you to configure the pins which would normally (on a Mac monitor) auto-sense the display resolution and color depth and pass it from OS to monitor and back again. Those auto-sensing pins are not to be found in VGA, and so PC monitors never had the built-in configurability that in Windows had to be built into the operating system instead.
Of course, this was also the era of what a co-worker called "connector-of-the-week club" at Apple; every few weeks, it seemed, there was some trick new interface standard for all the third-party developers to have to code around, like the PDS slots and daughterboards which seemed specifically engineered so as to prevent any third party from selling any add-on components which might compete with Apple's own. (A friend who worked at one such third-party company at the time said that "Apple is no different fundamentally, from a business sense, from Microsoft. The only difference is that Microsoft pulled it off.")
But still. Look at that adapter, will you? Look at it. Damn.
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