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I think the thing people don't appreciate is how good different resolutions looked. Every res was "native". None of that crazy non-integer scaling you get with fixed pixel displays like lcds.

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The older Sun monitors were fixed frequency (not multisync like a typical PC CRT monitor), so you only got one resolution, it couldn't sync to anything else :)

I had a couple of these over the years. I ended up using specialist graphics cards to use them with a PC. The crude scaling built into the cards made old PC games and NES games gloriously blocky, on top of the gorgeous colours and blacks.

I used a SparcStation 2 as an X terminal for several years in the late 1990s, having picked it up free as a student. Eventually PC monitors and my budget improved to the point that I retired it, but it was massively better than the cheap 14" CRT I had on my PC at the time.

I did have to contribute floating point emulation support to the Linux sparc32 kernel code, as otherwise the X server would occasionally crash when it hit a denormal number in the font rendering...

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