In honor of yesterday’s departure of a few monitors, here are a few other monitor memories.
The first color computer monitor my family ever owned was an Amdek, which was actually the third computer monitor we ever owned. Our first was the TRS-80 Model III’s internal black and white monitor; our second was an amber-tinted one for our Apple clone. Amdek monitors last forever and come with a built-in handle which makes toting them around a breeze. When my Dad graduated from the Apple II to the PC XT, I inherited the Amdek monitor and used it with my Commodore 64 from 1985 to today. Yes — I still have the monitor, and it still works great. Here is a picture of the monitor from 1985 in use at my parents’ computer store, Yukon Software. It’s the one on the right, running the Apple II version of Little Computer People.
The first monitor I paid for with my own money was a Link brand VGA monitor, back in 1993. It was a 14″ monitor and I believe I paid around $199 for it.
When I set my BBS up, I needed a second monitor and so I went to a computer swap meet and picked up a cheap, used monitor for $50. When I got the monitor home I discovered that the blue and green guns were broken and the only color that worked was red. Since the monitor looked like hell I eventually painted flames on it. I later found out that the problem was not in the monitor but with the cord; after replacing it, it works fine. I bought this monitor in 1994 and it is sitting out on a shelf in my garage right now.
Back in the day, KVM systems (devices that let you share Keyboards, Video (monitors) and Mice between multiple machines) were super expensive, some of them costing more than $1,000! If you had the space, it was much more affordable to buy multiple keyboards and mice than it was to buy a KVM. By the time I shut down my BBS, I had five machines set up in my computer room, each with their own keyboards, mice and monitors. It was a mess, and while I didn’t run all of them all of the time, when I did have them all turned on my computer room shot up a good ten degrees.
Things have come a long way over the years. My current monitor is a 28″ flat screen that both cost less and weighs less than the 13″ Amdek monitor I have connected to my Commodore 64 upstairs.
ah, monitor nostalgia… actually, I have a Commodore 1701 monitor hooked up to my Mac Pro, and I use it as an NTSC reference whilst editing. Used it for years with my Atari 800, it has analog component inputs and still looks great!
We are the only two people I know that still have their Commodore 64s.
That either means that we are both incredibly cool, or completely unable to leg go of things that are way past their usefulness.
I’m leaning toward incredibly cool.