Re: Dual head question

[strobe anarkhos]

At 5:14 AM -0500 4/25/01, Robert J. Slover wrote:
>Actually, I never heard a PC user talk about it at all until a few years
>ago when they could finally do it (actually, you could do it on a PC too,
>but for the longest time one of the cards had to be hercules (different
>base IO address) or something special and configurable like a Viking
>card that had special driver support in GEM or AutoCad).
>
>I always have heard the reference to the display as 'head' when talking
>about servers or development machines.  For instance, my 13 Vaxen at my
>last job were all running 'headless' as were most of the Sun boxes.  At
>the job before that, we had some multi-headed AIX and Ultrix boxes in
>the lab.  My personal theory is that the usage stems from when and with
>whom the usage of multiple displays became common.  With a Mac, an end
>user has been able to do this since the Mac II...nothing special about
>it, it just works.  For PCs, you needed (and to some extent still do) to
>know what you were doing and were much more likely to be the type of user
>who had some experience behind the glass wall.  These kinds of folks will
>still call the Mac configuration multi-headed, and many will have no idea
>that this is nothing at all special on a Mac.

Actually multiple monitors has worked since the MacSE. Radius made a video card 
for the MacSE to drive a 20" b+w monitor around 1986 and you could use both 
screens just fine. It was very useful.

Looking in my bedroom alone I see several macs with multiple monitors:

G4 with a cheap OEM HerculesII GF2MX and retail 8MB ATI RagePro VR

6100/AV using built-in video and the AV card, which is a PDS video card

PB520 with a B+W LCD and a built-in video port (non-mirroring)

Pismo, similar to above

Mac IIfx with two nubus cards

I've also owned/used a 7600 and a Q950 both with multiple monitors. The 7600 
used three, 15, 20, and 19" B+W portrait. In fact I don't think I ever used a 
setup where the monitors were the same resolution, size, or aperture ratio.

In fact given my first mac was that souped-up MacSE, the only mac I've ever 
owned which did not use multiple monitors was a PB145! It's one of those 
technologies which quickly paid for itself in gained productivity (unlike 
virtual screens which have the opposite effect).