I was discussing various old computers with some folks online, and the topic turned to ‘what did screens look like in the 80’s?’
I dug around online for some examples and came up short, so I figured I’d make some based on the machines I have here in my home-office.
Fair warning, the image compression I use here is pretty brutal to get 20+ years of images to fit into a relatively cheap hosting platform, but these should be close enough to give you a feel for how things progressed. And clicking the images will open them separately for a true 1:1 experience.
First up would be the 1986 Macintosh Plus with its 9-inch monochrome monitor:
I remember when the Mac Plus was basically alien technology and the screen on it was awe inspiring. 🙂
Next up we have the 1993 PowerBook 165c – one of the first color laptops ever made:
Having 256 colors on the screen, at the same time, on a laptop, was mind blowing back in the day…
Now we move on to a high-end graphics machine from a year later – 1994 – the PowerMac 8100/80AV. Out of the box the 8100/80AV had enough video memory (2MB) to do 24-bit “TrueColor” at 800×600, but where it really rocked was being able to push 1024×768 at 16bit color:
I maxed out the video memory in mine (4MB, which was hundreds of dollars in the mid-90’s), so my 8100 could do 1024×768 in 24-bit in 1995.
And lastly we have the circa 2000 PowerBook “Pismo” which was an incredible machine in its day; 500Mhz PPC G3 CPU and an ATI Rage Mobility 128 video card with 8MB… Things haven’t really gotten much better than this over the years – just more and more pixels using more and more ram.
My current video card, an AMD RX 9700 XTX, has 24GB of ram (a mere 3000 percent more than in Y2K) and can push the same 24bit at up to 8192×4320 – which is 5.5 times taller and 8 times wider than circa 2000’s screens – or roughly 16 times the data per frame…
Living in the future is pretty cool.
Listening to "Sing Me Away" by Night Ranger