Better resolutions

Diagram of Screen Sizes

Late Douglas Adams had the knack for describing things that would resonate with geeks in general and computer scientist in particular. His explanations of the Electric Monk in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency regularly come to my mind when talking about dysfunctional computer systems. Another device devised by him is the total perspective vortex, a machine that would give during a short moment a sense of perspective to a human, rendering him mad instantly.

One thing that is difficult to put into perspective is the tremendous growth of computers systems. After my post about Commodore 64 graphics, I wanted to get a sense of scale of the various computer screens I used over my lifetime, so I did a little graphic. Here are the resolution of various computers I owned. The encompassing box is the 30 inch screen I use at work nowadays, which has a resolution of 2560 × 1600.

Resolutions
Device Year Resolution
Commodore 64 1982 320 × 200
Mac Classic 1990 512 × 342
PowerMac 7100 1994 1024 × 768
PowerMac G4 1999 1280 × 1024
MacBook Pro 2011 1280 × 800
Sony PS3 2006 1280 × 800
Sony Ericsson 802SE 2004 176 × 220
iPhone 3G 2008 320 × 480
iPhone 4 2010 640 × 960

3 thoughts on “Better resolutions”

  1. Funny, I’ve showed my son today one of my favorite games from about 1986 (?) on a Macintosh (Mac manager, an economical simulation). I use minivmac for the emulation.

    That gives a 512×342 window on a 1920 x 1080 iMac screen. What a difference!

    And the game is still so good in such a small window.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.