90's Monitors

Back in that period they used 15 pin video graphic array connectors VGA for short. These connector were some of the worst they were analog which meant more shielding and separation for better signals. That made these cables thick and stiff, not in a good way. The actual terminations on the end of the cable were also the worst the often caused the cable to stick out like 5 inches from behind the computer. Also they had these thumb screws on either side of the terminal. The connectors that they plugged into were also a huge hassle they had these female receptacles for the screws and for some reason they could be unscrewed from the terminal. Often after removing a cable these female screw insert would follow stay on the cable, and have you would have to take them off with a pair of needle nose pliers. Because the girth of VGA cables if you didn’t have theses screws in place whenever a user would adjust the monitor you would need to be called over to fix the issue.

Then next “innovation” were DVI or digital visual interface style cables. They were very similar to VGA cable but would carry digital signal, but nothing much changed. The DVI cable were just as girthy as VGA probably even thicker. They kept the horrible screw terminals. Actually they kinda made CRTs worse because of the digital cable the monitors got bigger. Some users in graphic design like making sign wanted 27 inch monitors which is considered small now back then a 27” CRT weighed in at around 50 pounds and would take two people to lift into place. Usually user would want to tuck these workstations in to corner so those big cable would be push into sharp angles which was really bad for them. This often cause issue like flickering, color artifacts, or scanline artifacts.

The thing is these CRTs stuck around for a long time because often people would invest hundred of dollars on them. But nowadays we rarely see them, some retro gamers still use them because they give their games the scanlines that they were used to. I remember some of the brands that would make these CRTs like Viewsonic, NEC, and Sony Trinitron. Amazingly the one thing that still round are those horrible VGA connectors. They are often used because they are cheap and