I had a laugh at the mention of the Number Nine Revolution IV graphics card.
Back when the SGI 1600SW monitor came out, I had more disposable income than common sense. I ended up buying two of them and the accompanying RevIV-FP graphics cards. They were they very best in LCD screens with a digital display connection (OpenLDI, which sadly never caught on), and continued to be so for years afterwards.
I continued using them for a long time in a dual-head setup, until support for the Nine RevIV-FP graphic card in XFree86 evaporated. By that time, monitors with DVI input were finally becoming widely available.
The uptake of digital display connections was frustratingly slow in the early 2000's. I had tried a couple different VGA LCD screens around the turn of the millennia, but I was disappointed with image quality of the digital->analog->digital conversion, which has since improved a lot.
Those 1600SW monitors were very expensive, but running them as long as I did, I suppose I got my money's worth out of them.
Actually... I think they're still in the basement somewhere...
Gosh, super cool. Can I collect them off of you cheap? :-) Being an old SGI fan, I have been collecting them over the years and donating to e.g. Computer History Museum. Dan Evanicky is one of the main folks who worked on it, and I've been in touch with him over the years about the history of it all. PDF at http://goo.gl/T4YNYZ
Back when the SGI 1600SW monitor came out, I had more disposable income than common sense. I ended up buying two of them and the accompanying RevIV-FP graphics cards. They were they very best in LCD screens with a digital display connection (OpenLDI, which sadly never caught on), and continued to be so for years afterwards.
I continued using them for a long time in a dual-head setup, until support for the Nine RevIV-FP graphic card in XFree86 evaporated. By that time, monitors with DVI input were finally becoming widely available.
The uptake of digital display connections was frustratingly slow in the early 2000's. I had tried a couple different VGA LCD screens around the turn of the millennia, but I was disappointed with image quality of the digital->analog->digital conversion, which has since improved a lot.
Those 1600SW monitors were very expensive, but running them as long as I did, I suppose I got my money's worth out of them.
Actually... I think they're still in the basement somewhere...