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Date:      Tue, 07 Apr 1998 23:30:59 -0500
From:      David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net>
To:        Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Summary: shopping for new video adapter 
Message-ID:  <199804080430.XAA08113@nospam.hiwaay.net>
In-Reply-To: Message from Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>  of "Wed, 08 Apr 1998 13:10:58 %2B0930." <19980408131058.01172@freebie.lemis.com> 

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Greg Lehey writes:
> On Tue,  7 April 1998 at 22:05:12 -0500, David Kelly wrote:
> > How so? Personally I never had more than 4 monitors on one Mac. Decided
> > I was getting irradiated too much. Installation was trivial, simply
> > plugged another Nubus card in, connected the monitor, and on power up
> > the Mac guessed where to put the new monitor in relationship to the
> > others. A little shuffling around in the Monitors Control Panel informed
> > the Mac where I had phyically placed the new one in relation to the
> > others.
> 
> How did you arrange them?  I have a 20" monitor I would like to add to
> my machine, but I can't figure out where to put it.

Had the two 19" monitors side by side. Color on the far left, monochrome
on the right. One was on another table the other was on a 30" x 60"
table I built myself. The Mac IIvx was under a shelf (to the right of
the big monitors) which was only about 36" long (to leave room for the
19" monitor). The 13" monitor was placed on top of this shelf. The 19"
monitors each had a separate Nubus card, the 13" used the built in Mac
IIvx video.

None of my 3 monitors ran the same resolution. The 19" color was
1024x768x24 bits, 19" mono was something like 1152x892, and 13" color
was 640x480x16 bits. I aligned the top edges of the 19" monitors
together, the top of the 13" monitor appeared a couple of inches above
the top of the 19" mono, but to the right. Think I usually ran the color
monitors at 8 bits for faster drawing. PCB CAD doesn't need all that
many colors. :-)

Keyboard and mouse stayed pretty close to the 19" monochrome monitor. 
Color 19" (which was on another table) was turned in toward the 
keyboard sorta forming a cockpit. Guess the color monitor was 45 
degrees to my left and about 12" in "front" of the mono.

Poor little Mac "only" had 20MB of RAM and a LocalTalk network
connection. It was this system I initially downloaded SLS Linux with.
Wrote the boot floppies using SoftPC to run rawrite. AccessPC wrote the
bulk of the install floppies in MS-DOS format. Installed on a 486DX33
8MB 240MB HD on the same table as the 19" color monitor. Later switched
to Slackware. Then Linux trashed its filesystem one time too many, I had
heard of FreeBSD and gave FreeBSD 2.0.0R a shot. Never looked back. That
was February '95, I think. Or was it 1994? Has it been that long?

It was '91 or '92 that I heard of this thing called "386BSD". Wish I'd 
kept my 0.0 and 0.1 floppies, not that I have time to play with them. 
Later Linux sure did look advanced, it had shared libraries. Even later 
when I returned to BSD, FreeBSD sure did feel familiar. And this is 
from someone who spends a lot of time running SGI Irix systems.

Did you know a Mac IIvx running ZTerm can send files via zmodem to an
old Linux 486DX33 with a 16450 UART and IDE HD at 38,400? The Linux
system will drop packets every 30 seconds when it sync's its
filesystems. 19,200 yeilds about the same thruput but without errors. 
Never tried the same thing with FreeBSD.

Have never used a multi-headed X server. How does it establish the
relationship between monitors? How do you move the mouse from one to the
next? On the Mac, the mouse simply slides from monitor to monitor. If
there is not a monitor adjacent to the edge you try to move the mouse
off, then the mouse doesn't move off the desktop. Fun thing to do is
split a window between multiple monitors. Type right off one monitor
onto the next. If one wants to see what something looked like in
monochrome and color, that window could be placed half on one, half on
the other, for instant results.


--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@nospam.hiwaay.net
=====================================================================
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.



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