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.
I had a thunderscan. I spent weeks scanning the entirety of the loose-leaf AD&D 2e Monstrous Compendium and uploaded the 72dpi b&w monster images to my local Hermes bbs as PICTs. I don’t know why. It made sense to me at the time.
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.
Portrait is great with a medium size and 16:10 or wider. 16:9 (or rather 9:16) is too skinny for two side by side windows and kinda too tall/wide for one.
Idk what WUXGA is (I find that initialism system hard to memorize past SVGA, and am amused that they still keep making up new ones), but I used to put a 1080p on its side all the time 5-10 years ago and frequently used it for a full screen terminal window. Most of the action in a terminal is down near the bottom so it wasn’t a big ergo issue, but occasionally it’s nice to be able to see dozens of lines of scrollback, such as viewing a man page, text editor editing a medium sized config file, etc.
It was still the best monitor I'd used up to that point. My current Eizo EV3285 is my all-time favorite, though $300 alternatives aren't far off. That last 5% is worth it to me.
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.
I started work at an interactive museum exhibit design firm that had one. It was a great monitor but I believe its case was made of cast iron. More than anything when I reminisce about that monitor I think of the weight.
I collected odd bits into a Mac IIfx and that was an envelope pushing machine for a System 7 Mac in the early 90's.
On the other hand, the entire page flickers uncontrollably on a high-dpi screen. Might be solved with `image-rendering: pixelated` for those backgrounds.
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!
My Mac IIcx with Apple Portrait Display was a lovely system.
Luckily most modern screens like my LG can be pivoted to vertical, and then the Mac lets you specify the rotation. There's no more need for vertical-only screens.
I never got into the whole vertical screen thing. There must be something to it, though, because the smart people at Xerox designed the Alto[0] with one. Apple also came out with a vertical display a year after the Radius display came out[1].
I find it hard to believe that an idea that's resurfaced 3 times in less than 2 decades is a bad idea. Maybe it's a good idea, but not good enough to overcome peoples' internal resistance to change? Maybe it's actually such an off the wall idea that it actually creates some of that resistance?
In any case, I can't imagine anyone would want to come out with a fixed, vertical display these days, though. A rotatable display seems strictly superior in most cases, and is reasonably well supported (at least in OSX and Linux -- not sure about Windows). The only advantage a fixed display might have over a rotatable display is that perhaps a fixed display could be a smidge more compact, due to not needing the mounting and rotation hardware. But, again, these days, displays are generally pretty thin, so I'm not sure that would even make any difference.
I guess you have to try it for a few hours to get it. Mine is a non-orientable LG monitor (https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq750-c-dualup-monitor). The near-square aspect ratio makes it wide enough to stay confortable if work goes horizontal for a bit. Of note, the other LG model _does_ rotate (28MQ780)
I'd say they're less popular because it's seen mostly as an oddity (if seen at all). We've adopted the mindset that screens are to be horizontal without regard for their purpose. Also, because less are produced, they are more expensive, although not prohibitively so.
A rotating screen has multiple constraints:
- needs to be firmly attached to the desk or have a heavy stand
- requires more desk space to operate than the horizontal because it goes as wide as the diagonal while it rotates
- cable management can be more difficult, especially if used as a USB hub
- OS dynamic orientation management should be ok (Windows too) but might bring occasional challenge with some apps?
Strong :+1: from me. I am typing on a 27" retina iMac with a second 27" Thunderbolt display on my right, in portrait mode thanks to a SuperMac stand that was as expensive as a cheapo LCD in its own right.
But it's fantastic for reading long PDFs and other not-readily-resizable documents, for searching through my emails and so on. Much more use than a widescreen – whose adoption was driven, not for computers or software or ergonomics or anything, but by the commodities of the scale of production of TV screens.
I always assumed that was the reason too, but it feels like there was really only a narrow window when there was a significant crossover between monitor panels and TV panels.
Most all new TVs are 32" or larger, so that's not going to widely impact what 20-27" monitor panels can benefit from. Even when smaller LCD TVs were popular, they were often 720p or 1266x768 panels, but most monitors were 1080p.
OTOH, maybe it was more of a second-order thing: people were primed from TV and movies to expect wide-format content, so monitor makers had to produce products that satisfied that; people don't like letterboxed/pillarboxed displays.
Another portrait display user here! I use a 19:10 display rotated to 1200x1920. Not retina but I'm happy with it. I have window manager keyboard shortcuts set so I can position windows as halves, thirds, quarters, full screen, push windows to the MacBook display or my iPad. It's a powerful setup. It's the one great thing Apple neglected to take from Xerox PARC. Also interesting that more people don't do it in their desktop when everybody uses iPhone in portrait.
Early workstations (Alto, CADR, PERQ etc) were portrait, and a lot of development was done on portrait ASCII terminals too (e.g. AAA). I was always puzzled as to what caused the switch in the mid 80s.
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.
Oh, man. I remember multi-monitor shenanigans just for the lulz. They were fun. (They were problematic in the CRT days because the magnetics would fight eachother sometimes, but even that was interesting to sort out.)
And I remember the Radius "full page" monitor's introduction, and even saw some in the wild a couple of times. They always seemed bizarrely fit-for-purpose, and some part of me really wanted to score one for longer than I'd like to admit -- especially once PDFs became commonplace.
But your own story just prompted me to hold an 8.5x11" piece of paper up to the 24" 16x9 display on my desk -- a display size that I've been using for well over a decade now.
To my surprise, it can display more than two 8.5x11 full-page documents at one time.
And somewhat to my disdain, I've realized that I have never once actually used it this way.
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?
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.
I think you mean Aldus PageMaker. ;-)
Yes, you are correct.
Thunderscan? There's some neat history behind that project.
https://www.folklore.org/Thunderscan.html
I had a thunderscan. I spent weeks scanning the entirety of the loose-leaf AD&D 2e Monstrous Compendium and uploaded the 72dpi b&w monster images to my local Hermes bbs as PICTs. I don’t know why. It made sense to me at the time.
1 reply →
That was it. We squeezed every trick out of that thing.
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.
Portrait is great with a medium size and 16:10 or wider. 16:9 (or rather 9:16) is too skinny for two side by side windows and kinda too tall/wide for one.
Idk what WUXGA is (I find that initialism system hard to memorize past SVGA, and am amused that they still keep making up new ones), but I used to put a 1080p on its side all the time 5-10 years ago and frequently used it for a full screen terminal window. Most of the action in a terminal is down near the bottom so it wasn’t a big ergo issue, but occasionally it’s nice to be able to see dozens of lines of scrollback, such as viewing a man page, text editor editing a medium sized config file, etc.
It was still the best monitor I'd used up to that point. My current Eizo EV3285 is my all-time favorite, though $300 alternatives aren't far off. That last 5% is worth it to me.
I love Eizo because they market a square display, for those who simply can't decide between portrait and landscape.
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.
I started work at an interactive museum exhibit design firm that had one. It was a great monitor but I believe its case was made of cast iron. More than anything when I reminisce about that monitor I think of the weight.
I collected odd bits into a Mac IIfx and that was an envelope pushing machine for a System 7 Mac in the early 90's.
The combination of font and some ClearType shenanigans produced this amusing result: https://postimg.cc/4KDDLr9Y
I also see this weird green-purple gradient in the text. It disappears if you zoom in or out.
You can make it go in waves:
On the other hand, the entire page flickers uncontrollably on a high-dpi screen. Might be solved with `image-rendering: pixelated` for those backgrounds.
Yuck. Do not want. It's almost physically disorienting for me to look at that, like my eyes can't focus on anything in the image.
HPPD mode enabled.
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!
My Mac IIcx with Apple Portrait Display was a lovely system. Luckily most modern screens like my LG can be pivoted to vertical, and then the Mac lets you specify the rotation. There's no more need for vertical-only screens.
I had a IIcx with a Radius FPD, a dream machine! I could see a "page" of code without scrolling. I'd forgotten about the Apple FPD.
I never got into the whole vertical screen thing. There must be something to it, though, because the smart people at Xerox designed the Alto[0] with one. Apple also came out with a vertical display a year after the Radius display came out[1].
I find it hard to believe that an idea that's resurfaced 3 times in less than 2 decades is a bad idea. Maybe it's a good idea, but not good enough to overcome peoples' internal resistance to change? Maybe it's actually such an off the wall idea that it actually creates some of that resistance?
In any case, I can't imagine anyone would want to come out with a fixed, vertical display these days, though. A rotatable display seems strictly superior in most cases, and is reasonably well supported (at least in OSX and Linux -- not sure about Windows). The only advantage a fixed display might have over a rotatable display is that perhaps a fixed display could be a smidge more compact, due to not needing the mounting and rotation hardware. But, again, these days, displays are generally pretty thin, so I'm not sure that would even make any difference.
---
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
[1]: https://www.cultofmac.com/469981/today-in-apple-history-reme...
I guess you have to try it for a few hours to get it. Mine is a non-orientable LG monitor (https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-28mq750-c-dualup-monitor). The near-square aspect ratio makes it wide enough to stay confortable if work goes horizontal for a bit. Of note, the other LG model _does_ rotate (28MQ780)
I'd say they're less popular because it's seen mostly as an oddity (if seen at all). We've adopted the mindset that screens are to be horizontal without regard for their purpose. Also, because less are produced, they are more expensive, although not prohibitively so.
A rotating screen has multiple constraints:
- needs to be firmly attached to the desk or have a heavy stand
- requires more desk space to operate than the horizontal because it goes as wide as the diagonal while it rotates
- cable management can be more difficult, especially if used as a USB hub
- OS dynamic orientation management should be ok (Windows too) but might bring occasional challenge with some apps?
> Vertical screens are fantastic
Strong :+1: from me. I am typing on a 27" retina iMac with a second 27" Thunderbolt display on my right, in portrait mode thanks to a SuperMac stand that was as expensive as a cheapo LCD in its own right.
But it's fantastic for reading long PDFs and other not-readily-resizable documents, for searching through my emails and so on. Much more use than a widescreen – whose adoption was driven, not for computers or software or ergonomics or anything, but by the commodities of the scale of production of TV screens.
I always assumed that was the reason too, but it feels like there was really only a narrow window when there was a significant crossover between monitor panels and TV panels.
Most all new TVs are 32" or larger, so that's not going to widely impact what 20-27" monitor panels can benefit from. Even when smaller LCD TVs were popular, they were often 720p or 1266x768 panels, but most monitors were 1080p.
OTOH, maybe it was more of a second-order thing: people were primed from TV and movies to expect wide-format content, so monitor makers had to produce products that satisfied that; people don't like letterboxed/pillarboxed displays.
1 reply →
Another portrait display user here! I use a 19:10 display rotated to 1200x1920. Not retina but I'm happy with it. I have window manager keyboard shortcuts set so I can position windows as halves, thirds, quarters, full screen, push windows to the MacBook display or my iPad. It's a powerful setup. It's the one great thing Apple neglected to take from Xerox PARC. Also interesting that more people don't do it in their desktop when everybody uses iPhone in portrait.
Early workstations (Alto, CADR, PERQ etc) were portrait, and a lot of development was done on portrait ASCII terminals too (e.g. AAA). I was always puzzled as to what caused the switch in the mid 80s.
Very much agree.
As it turns out, a 55” 4K OLED TV as a monitor is practically the same as two big vertical monitors side by side :)
What is the distance between your eyes and the screen?
1 reply →
I like one in each orientation. I am using one huge screen now but I'll go back to two monitors the next time round.
I use two portrait 5Ks on the left and right, then a landscape 5K in the middle. It forms a giant H.
Best of both worlds.
2 replies →
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?
Works with the browser tools, on #page. Didn't have to move the background.
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.
Oh, man. I remember multi-monitor shenanigans just for the lulz. They were fun. (They were problematic in the CRT days because the magnetics would fight eachother sometimes, but even that was interesting to sort out.)
And I remember the Radius "full page" monitor's introduction, and even saw some in the wild a couple of times. They always seemed bizarrely fit-for-purpose, and some part of me really wanted to score one for longer than I'd like to admit -- especially once PDFs became commonplace.
But your own story just prompted me to hold an 8.5x11" piece of paper up to the 24" 16x9 display on my desk -- a display size that I've been using for well over a decade now.
To my surprise, it can display more than two 8.5x11 full-page documents at one time.
And somewhat to my disdain, I've realized that I have never once actually used it this way.
Well, if you'd tilt that thing into portrait-mode, you could comfortably read a full page of a classic daily newspaper, like NYT, WP, or the likes.
But news are bad for you, so don't do... ;-)
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 got one of the 2 page displays in the late 90's attached to a 2ci. It was ok, but heavy as hell.
I wound up installing netbsd on it and running it as my router for a while.
There was. I had one at work, it was huge (for the time). It displayed in 4-bit grayscale IIRC.
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.
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