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Comment by msarnoff | Hacker News Reader

Wow! What a surprise to see this here. I made this 10 years ago, when the display ecosystem was much different than it is today.

In 2008, if you were using a device with an LCD screen, it almost definitely had a rectilinear R-G-B subpixel arrangement. Nowadays devices have all kinds of exotic subpixel schemes (and are usable in many different orientations!) so its usefulness is a bit limited if you're on a mobile device.

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Love your other projects too by the way! Especially the serial terminal. At our lab we needed another workstation and the IT-Department took ages to give us one. So we modded an old surveillance CRT into a Terminal with your circuit and connected it to the existing PC. Now two people can work with one Workstation. It is still used to this day (albeit more because of the cool factor).

I would imagine that the bigger problem is increased resolution. Less so on the desktop, but even there 4K displays are far more common than they used to be.

Resolution is not really the problem. When it comes to that, assuming the RGB horizontal rectilinear subpixel arrangement that dominated the lanscape, having higher resolution just means you could pack more text onto a given screen.

But if you were to send militext to, say, a pentile display, it comes out as unrecognizible mess. It'd also not work with CRT displays, even vertical mask Trinitrons, because, albeit the phosphors may look like subpixels, they're actually "just" sampling points along image lines, traced out by an electron beam, and each digital image pixel would cover several phosphor pitches and not change apruptly.

My point is that it's packed so tight as to be unreadable with the naked eye on those displays.

It still works on my 2016 Retina macbook pro:

https://imgur.com/gallery/tnsYzf1

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