[conspire] Hercules graphics card

[Michael Paoli]

> Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2018 17:04:45 -0800
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Subject: Re: [conspire] new computer?
> Message-ID: <20181122010445.GJ4617 at linuxmafia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Quoting Ivan Sergio Borgonovo (ivan at webthatworks.it):
>
>> uh let's add Trident, Sis, Matrox (nice boards), Genoa, Paradise,
>> Chips and Technologies, Tseng, Cirrus, Via, S3, 3dfx, Oak, Number
>> nine (nice tech), Hercules (I can't believe I had one, high res, no
>> colors)...
>
> Hey, I _loved_ my Hercules graphics card.  And the colour was fine:
> your choice of crisp green or amber against glorious black.

Heh, ... when I was first running Linux, I had a genuine Hercules
monochrome graphics card.  See, before that, I'd been running
SCO Unix - and before that SCO Xenix.  With SCO, essentially dang near
*everything* was an extra cost.  E.g. want networking (beyond UUCP),
that'll cost extra.  X11, that'll cost extra - oh, and you'll have
have to upgrade hardware too (VGA, mouse, ...), want SMP, that'll
cost extra too.

Well, I'd been running Linux a while (thrilling that first time being able
to ping 127.0.0.1 - without having to pay extra, etc.), and lo and behold,
I discover through my Linux reading/research that (then xfree86) X11 on
Linux supports the Hercules monochrome card.  Cool ... so, ... pick a window
manager (fvwm - hardly need a mouse, can do most all from keyboard) and ...
I'm off and running X11 ... okay, 1-bit monochrome, but it was X, and worked
fine.  Then I thought time to get a mouse to make (at least some) things
a bit easier.  Oh, and Netscape browser at the time had a bug.
If one was doing 1-bit X11 monochrome, all the images were displayed in
reverse video.  So essentially looking at any graphics on the web was like
seeing a very poor quality black-and-white negative.  Fun times!  Yeh
couldn't touch that with SCO, without spending a lot more $$ on both
software and hardware.

And the color was great on the Hercules monochrome card ... black and whatever
color your your monochrome phosphor on the CRT glowed (I generally went with
amber, that being about easiest on the eyes for prolonged use - among the
monochrome possibilities ... heck, still tend to set my terminal colors
that way).