Hardware

by Louis Aponte

Multimedia and one of its hardware elements

I am seated at a 3 year old computer, the Intel Pentium 4 chip works at a frequency of 2.84 Ghz, my motherboard boasts a Gigabyte of memory and a graphics card which has 128 Megabytes of it’s own memory. My first computer ran at 10 Mhz, had a turbo setting allowing it to run at 12 Mhz, and had the usual 640 Kb of base memory. These were not multimedia computers, but we have come a long way. I would like to tell you about the changes I have seen in the hardware over the last 30 years.

The first computer consoles I was able to sit at were both only one color. The first one, I remember was amber and then I worked with a Unix system which had a green monitor. This green monitor through time burnt in a ghost image of the Word Perfect Software which explains why we have screen savers today. These early monitors were identified as MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter). Later they were followed by a Hercules Graphics Card was an MDA which included extensions for graphics. Both these computers resulted in a screen resolution of 720 X 350 pixels (348 on the Hercules).

The early IBM PC shipped with a CGA (Color Graphics Adapter) that was the bomb, well almost the bomb. A CGA system gave you four colors in graphics mode and eight in text mode. The addressable pixels decreased to a screen resolution of 640 X 200 in color. This was really cool back then, but CGA soon became annoying, they had problems that lead to screen snow, and some programs would flicker the whole time you ran them. This had to do with how the processor accessed the CGA card, causing interference to the refresh rate.

The EGA (Enhanced Graphics adapter) saved the day it was able to support 16 colors out of a 64 color palette at 640 X 350 pixels. The really modern thing was the ability it had that it was backward compatible with CGA. This sounds so archaic now in our modern world, but the Television and the computer monitor were not the same thing back then. After EGA came, VGA and then SVGA and these hardware improvements directly lead to the multimedia computer of today.