News: General

Displays Now, Displays Then

by Keith R. Wheeler

12/8/2004

Advertising for LCD and plasma televisions has reached fever pitch during the holiday shopping season. With that in mind, let’s take a look back and compare how we, literally, view our computer work now and back at the early stages of computing in small business. Early computer monitors were simple to describe: monochrome. Depending on your choice of manufacturer, the choice was green, amber or gray. Of course, color monitors became available and, with better graphics cards, were a huge improvement. Naturally, the magnetic field used to create the image on the screen was so powerful that it could immediately erase the data stored on a floppy disk. A typical, affordable monitor in 1987, our benchmark year, was an IBM PS/2 8513 monitor with 640x480 resolution capable of displaying 262,144 colors on a 12 inch screen (10.1” viewable) for a suggested retail price of $750.00. Fast forward to current monitors, such as a $369.00 Dell 17” UltraSharp 1704FP with a 17 inch viewable area with resolution of 1280x1024 displaying roughly 16 million colors. How much better is the new technology? With a screen area 2.8 times as large (138.7 square inches vs 49.4), 63 times as many colors, 4.3 times as many pixels and half the cost, the new displays are approximately 1517 times better than the old monitors statistically. This analysis fades in comparison to the subjective point that the images being displayed just look a million times better than they could have in 1987.