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How hard is it to turn high-speed electrons into pixels on a screen? Pretty hard, actually...
Let's start with the good news. I plugged all eight monitors into the mains and none of them went bang. That means that the DC transformer circuits are all still intact after two or three decades - no exploding capacitors, like last month's LISAs. But the next step was to hook each monitor up to a video signal and there I hit my first snag. Two of the monitors use the obscure DB-15 connector and another pair use the even more obscure 13w3 connector, an early Apple experiment to carry data and power in the same cable. A meticulous rummage through my Big Box o' Cables confirmed what I knew in my heart already: I didn't have either of them. Even on eBay, cables with these connectors are quite hard to find. It might be possible one day to reverse engineer my own cables, if I can find the pin schematics online, but for now, those four monitors are back in the 'pending pile'.
Blink and you miss it
The next monitor I looked at was the Microvitec GPM 1701. This is a thirdparty monitor from the mid 90s that was popular with Amiga and Acorn Archimedes owners. It uses a standard VGA connector, which is a promising start, but when I connected it to the only working Mac I own that has a VGA output (a G3 PowerBook), the image was very unstable. For about half a second out of every 10, there would...
