A Ludicrous Display

[@ActionRetro]

Shargeek 170: bit.ly/4cJ3oJm Retro 67: bit.ly/4aX9K6f

Haha are you messing with Colin with this nice working trackball? 😂

[@lexacutable]

I was wondering that too lol

[@nismoklutchkicker]

That’s the mouse he almost always uses with these videos. The only exception is the hamster mouse that’s occasionally used.

[@Nexxxeh]

iirc I think it was a playful joke because Colin (This Does Not Compute, and IYL AR, YML TDNC, worth a sub!) just posted a video about a trackball that he wasn't able to resurrect.

[@seanys]

I opened the comments to say exactly this! 😂 Cheeky, Sean.

[@lrochfort]

Rotating displays like this have always been an optical illusion to me. When horizontal my mind says it's effectively square, but when vertical it's significantly taller than it is wide

[@prestonlippmann9355]

I feel the same way. Even 4:3 displays look so much more rectangular when vertical.

[@szr8]

​@@prestonlippmann9355Just like with many classic arcade games that were in portrait orientation (which was a CRT display set on its side.) They always felt really tall compared to landscape cabinets.

[@VicTheVicar]

Please upload that install floppy to the Macintosh garden! I've tried some of the drivers on the garden and I only get a wonky blue screen on my Pivot card for the SE/30.

[@MaxOakland]

Hope he sees this

[@ET_AYY_LMAO]

Its actually not ludicrus, my dad had a print shop back in the late 80s and he used monitors like this because fits nicely a A4 paper in desktop publishing apps.

[@jonjohnson2844]

Did you see that ludicrous display last night? What was Wenger thinking bringing Walcott on that early.

[@dontgoaway0]

The thing about Arsenal is they always try and walk it in!

[@finkelmana]

Back in the mid and late 90s, portrait based monitors werent uncommon in graphic design and typography/publishing environments. They allowed you to see an entire page of a document without scrolling up and down. However, they didnt stick around very long, from what I remember. Higher resolution 4x3 monitors started to take over.

[@AaronOfMpls]

Some other office environments too; I remember one (attached to a Mac) in the school office when I was a kid ~30 years ago, so the office staff could see a whole page of a document more easily.

[@thematicschematic]

Yeah, I worked for a local paper as a teenager in the 90s, and the typesetting, TV schedule and Web departments all had macs with portrait Radius displays. I think they were called PageView or PageDisplay.

[@skunkwerkz777]

we had a graphics/print lab in HS 99-02 where i was working typesetting printing presses plate burning photography developing. We had a whole row of rotating monitors for graphics and production related items. Calling it totally unreasonable seems like click bait garbage

[@pseydtonne]

I want to add some extra context, as someone that had the opportunity to use these grayscale beauties during college and drooooooled over them. I realize that must sound nuts when I look at my matched pair of 7:3 monitors that were cheaper together than a Radius was new and say, "eh, they're only 1080p". Having a whole page in portrait mode didn't merely mean letter-size (8.5" x 11" or A4) but tabloid (11" x 17" or A3). Back when a laser printer was far more expensive than three of the computers connected to it via AppleTalk or LocalTalk, you wanted a really good idea how your results would look before you took them to the printers. Oh right, because we were publishing zines and newspapers, not web sites. You had to control for printer roll-off (not the correct term) of white and black. You had 256 shades (8 whole bits!) of gray on screen. However the printer would often turn 85% black saturation or higher into black, 15% black saturation and lower into white. There were tools to create scales for this, so that your photos could look vaguely correct. There was even a Photoshop knock-off that worked only in grayscale. I can see it in my head but cannot recall the name (nor find after 20 minutes of searching). It was my fave for a couple years.

[@USSMariner]

I refuse to build a workstation setup without at least one vertical monitor. Whether it's documents or scrolling Twitter, vertical monitors are extremely useful. Same thing with having a vertical Taskbar for a wide monitor.

[@VeronicaExplains]

I love the notch in the Radius display so it can easily be adjusted!

[@MrMegaManFan]

My first two years of college the computer lab had exactly ONE of these monitors, used for editing and laying out the student newspaper before the data was exported and sent off to be printed.

[@ChaunceyGardener]

The earliest Wacom Cintiq (Cintiq 18SX) was an early 2000s rotating LCD display where you could draw directly on screen like modern tablet displays. Image software like Photoshop could not freely rotate the virtual canvas so the whole thing rotated around its sturdy base like an animator desk. Nowadays modern software can rotate the canvas without rotating the whole interface!

[@Benzona]

I wanna see Minecraft ported to Mac OS 9 or earlier. I know java executables were never supported but it's gotta be possible, even if its just a port of ClassiCube or a simplified recreation from the ground up. P.S. - We're going to be taking my grandfather off life support today and he was the one who introduced me to classic computers. We used to watch this channel together and tinker with his old Macs and Apple II's and I just wanted to say thank you for the memories. It meant a lot to him that younger people still cared about the computers he loved in his younger years.

[@cathrynm]

Take care with your grandfather.

[@MaxOakland]

There is a Java runtime for Mac OS 9. Maybe something with that

[@Benzona]

@@MaxOakland yeah I tried to figure out someway to run classic survival test on os9 using it but couldn’t get very far

[@JaredConnell]

The screen itself was bigger than the entire mac se. I couldn't imagine how awesome it was to use one of those back when they were new!!

[@RolandHutchinson]

It was basically the most awesome awesomeness since awesomeness began to be awesome -- and an incredible productivity tool into the bargain.

[@rotteneffekt4416]

I had one of those come in when I was working as a service tech around 2000. That thing was awesomeness personified. Today I have two portraits flanking a 4k, things have moved on. Thanks for the mem trip.

[@theflint7692]

I've been working 20+ years in an industry which standardly uses dual monitors in portrait mode, and I've never seen a monitor that can change its own orientation when you rotate it. That's really cool.

[@cypherian2]

I never owned an SE-30, but I did have access to one at my college computer lab! Long Story short: It saved my bacon getting a paper done before a weekend I really wanted to spend goofing off with my friends and not stuck in front of my Mom's OLD typewriter! I really liked the RADIUS Monitors back in the day. In hindsight they remind me of the monitors that the Xerox PARC ALTO used in the '70s, before Apple/Steve Jobs stopped by to beg, borrow, and steal a lot of their ideas for the Lisa/Macintosh! This was a fun video to watch! Your Brain is always asking those "What if we did this with this and combined it with that?" kind of questions and I love it! Would very much like to see a follow up in the future!

[@felixlohrer9600]

I had one of these Radius Displays (connected to a Mac II SE). Loved it for perfect full page view in DTP.

[@jonathankleinow2073]

I just finished my SE/30 restoration project with similar specs to yours - 64 megs of RAM, a BlueSCSI v2, and a ROM-inator II, all inside a fancy blue MacEffects case. I was hitting that ADHD wall of, "Welp, that's finished, now I'm bored with it," but this video has me thinking I should set up some eBay alerts for accelerator and video cards.

[@greggv8]

Look for a Micron Exceed video card with the internal CRT greyscale adapter. IIRC there was a project to re-create the internal greyscale part since Micron sold more Exceed video cards than they did the optional internal greyscale adapters.

[@floodmaster]

Grease up those rollers! They're underneath the main body of the monitor and are pretty easily accessible. I have one of these monitors as well.

[@tschak909]

The SuperView slams a compressed framebuffer over SCSI. While it doesn't take up ALL of the SCSI bus bandwidth, it does take a sizeable chonk. They really intended it as a color display for DTP work. ;)

[@nicolesi2201]

When I was in high school we had a computer lab for our newspaper, I was the network admin and a writer for the newspaper. We had 10Base-2, a bunch of iiCX'es and iiCIs with those big grayscale Radius monitors, Xante Accel-A-Writer plate printers, etc. It was so cool. I miss the "Snow White" Macintosh aesthetic, wish they would bring it back but modernized in aluminum. I had A/UX and NetBSD running on these at one point.

[@theaustralianconundrum]

We ran them off our 9500/200 towers. Aldus pagemaker and some Adobe software for Pre-press. Good memories.

[@theaustralianconundrum]

In Australia there are so many Macs from the 80's and 90's now that are ending up at deceased estate sales and the poor old widowers have no idea of their value so they just give them away for peanuts. I have amassed a room full in just two years and at least half have original boxes, packing, manuals, software, spare new OEM HDD's and tons of RAM etc. I have every beige tower from Quadra's to the final Power PC's and everything in between. I'm loving it!!!!

[@artofnoise5013]

It's really nice how the Radius fades the display when it switches between horizontal and vertical orientation. That's a nice touch they didn't have to do.

[@zenmaster24]

that monitor is a gorgeous design for portrait

[@GeFeldz]

6:53 now that's quite a modern looking control panel! Cool!

[@choppergirlfpv]

These were common in Desktop Publishing small shops. I drooled over all of thme in MacWorld Magazine. Color graphics coming out of an SE/30 though was not common at the time. I didn't even know it was possible. I added a Radius 030 accelerator card to my SE to bring it up to SE/30 performance. All of this was super expensive at the time, but to die for. When I talked my grandfather into plunking down $4,000 on a Mac IIci, the same model I had been using at work, I was in heaven. Twenty years later when his IIci died, I'd make new cloned harddrives up for him and ship them, and then finally just shipped him an entire cloned IIci (so he wouldn't have to even swap in the hardrive) because I had like 10 of them by then in my collection.

[@donkimble]

These were popular at my hometown paper. The vertical orientation made a lot of sense for editors reading copy and Quark Express (the once-ubiquitous layout software that someone needs to do a KZbin history of. They just REFUSED to get out a PowerPC version of their software for so long that once they did InDesign had killed them.) important to note people hated the early versions of indesign as under featured and way behind Quark. But I ramble . This was early-mid 90’s.

[@burts06]

This is the best monitor combination and this time they all work!

[@Sevenfeet0]

This is a later revision Radius Pivot monitor. When I was in college in 1988, we had the 1st gen version that was compatible with a Mac SE with a special daughtercard that we used for the school newspaper. I had been brought on as one of the few students who could figure this new hardware out since I was being paid by Apple as a campus rep at the time (before hiring me full time after college).

[@RolandHutchinson]

My wife had exactly that sweet setup with the SE and the first-gen Radius monitor at work. I was still limping along at home on an original IBM-PC (complete with cassette port) -- but with a Microsoft mouse and Word for DOS (in character mode!) and a third-party hard disk.

[@BuddhaPhi]

I worked at a bunch of places in the mid-90s that had these Radius Pivot displays assigned to publishing staff. I always was envious!

[@thepenultimateninja5797]

The thing about Arsenal is, they always try to walk it in.

[@nrnoble]

I still have a my original SE30 (still working). The Mac supported multiple monitors several years before Windows; it was very cool at the time.

[@MSmith-Photography]

You're getting delivery of...an M2 powered accelerator card for the SE. 🤣

[@paul_boddie]

Well, Radius did actually make accelerator boards that used ARM processors before ARM was established as a separate company. They bought the processors, which were ARM2 devices, from VLSI who, as Acorn's chosen fabricator, were selling them as part of their own product range.

[@johannes_silhan]

Yes, those,were the days! I had exactly this setup: SE/30 and the Radius Pivot display. It was awesome. Unfortunately the display broke after a few years.

[@GalenlevyPhoto]

I remember playing with the Se/30 with the portrait monitor next to it. That was cool. It was in my school graphic design class.

[@DontGetHit648]

What a crazy coincidence. I just acquired a pivot a few days ago.

[@dmug]

Man I remember seeing those radius monitors or at least a computer at a local tech giant store, Incredible universe connected to a Mac as a kid and being wowed and a bit confused as to why someone would want to rotate a monitor. Only time I recall seeing a rotatable CRT in person.

[@TheCerealHobbyist]

I worked in a Mac focused ISP in the mid-1990s and the web devs all did these for vertical monitors on their Qudras as a second monitor. They’d code on it and look at the pages in a browser on the horizontal.

[@cliff8928]

This triggered memories of getting my PowerMac 8500/132 and Portrait Display Labs 1700 pivoting display back in 1996.

[@sniglom]

This is really cool. Impresses me that it works as well as it does with this weird hardware and such an old OS.

[@CruncherJBlock]

I had a IIsi with this monitor at my job back in the day. It was desktop publishing so it was in the vertical 95% of the time.

[@NeverlandSystemZor]

I LOVE that retro charger... but not as much as your insanity and antics. LOVE THIS!

[@ARandomKid-v4m]

“Alright who called for Ludicrous? Oh you don’t need me.”

[@EricsEdgeVideos]

I love the idea of setting up multiple screens for software development. Just as I would today. Looking forward to more info about how you arrange your coding environment.

[@TechnoBoomer]

Incredible ! I used to have a Mac SE/30 for years and I confirm it's one of the best computers I used to use... and I dreamt of using a Radius Pivot... I used to spent hours at a local dealership to use one but as I was student at the time, I couldn't own one. Thanks for this video. See U. François

[@marvinochieng6295]

your sponsor read was actually useful. very nice sir/madam

[@davidroemer5879]

you blew right past struggle into skruggle territory

[@mortenthorpe]

Radius was awesome! They made killer graphics cards and monitors back in the day

[@MatroxMillennium]

I have a different pivoting monitor - the Portrait Display Labs Pivot 1700! It doesn't have the nifty auto-orientation feature though. It was meant for PC connection and I believe you were meant to install a program that looked for a keyboard shortcut to switch orientation modes.

[@TechAmbr]

You've got a bona-fide 68k battlestation! That's awesome!

[@Aeduo]

Wolf3d being slow was basically the best I could've expected. I was thinking all kinds of issues like being on the wrong display, weirdly cut off, wrong display mode and most likely just crashing and locking up the OS.

[@gilesl]

I used to have a super colour hi res radius video card in my IIfx and it was amazing!

[@SchwaAlien]

I have a very similar one! Mine has an LC card for it and I’ve got my old overclocked LC475 stashed away; hopefully I can get them working together. I used to have an original LC with the cute little monitor too, but lost it in a theft.

[@osgeld]

when I got my SE (not 30) some 20 years ago it had the radius card, but no montitor ... the OG hard disk had pagemaker (I think) and it was all loaded with local school stuff so I cant guess what it was used for ... maybe some wicked badass games of shufflepuck cafe

[@andresbravo2003]

Damn. You got the Radius Monitor. I’ve seen this before.

[@retropuffer2986]

I used a program called "Stepping Out" to virtually simulate a full screen display. Made a huge difference in speed since you didn't have to use the scroll bar which slowed everything down. I always lusted after Radius products!

[@MaxOakland]

How did that work?

[@retropuffer2986]

@@MaxOakland You added system files and a cdev and after a reboot you basically got a virtual screen. You could move beyond the standard resolution to the side and below. There were functions to zoom in and out and jump around the virtual screen.

[@MaxOakland]

@@retropuffer2986 How interesting! There were so many amazing utilities for Macs back then

[@stevisf]

We had an SE/30 with a black and white Radius graphics card and 21" monitor way back in the day for my high school publishing lab. We used the large monitor as the primary monitor and then put toolbox windows on the small internal monitor. This greatly limited scrolling and screen redraws which were extremely painful.

[@jrtapley]

I spy a working Kensington Trackball… a little nudge to @ThisDoesNotCompute? 😂

[@OhFishyFish]

It has been scientifically proven that no man can attach an object to another object without saying "that's not going anywhere".

[@StSparky]

I remember those - you ever have a luggable with an orange plasma screen? I had use of one in the mid 80s.

[@mortenthorpe]

I had a Mac Quadra 650, which I upgraded with a Radius Spigot 24 video card… what a graphics card that was!

[@jwoody8815]

Those RAM cards, for lack of a better word, with pins are known as "SIPPs" (Single Inline Pin Package) If I am not mistaken they were the first iteration of end-user upgradeable RAM slots on motherboards. Once had an old 386 board that used SIPPs for the RAM modules that looks rather simular. BTW, super interesting video as alwayse. Please; Keepem comin'.

[@eDoc2020]

I don't know what came first but many boards were upgradeable by adding more DIPs.

[@mybachhertzbaud3074]

Loved these Radius monitors. Still have a secondary 17" HP rotating monitor for web use and it's great for pinball emulation.😁 Play On

[@DrBagPhD]

That monitor is sick, I love it

[@JeffTiberend]

I remember seeing someone who had an SE/30 in the early 90’s. But, the internal display could do 256 color grayscale. I don’t remember if it was a Radius card or not. When I saw this I was shocked that Apple didn’t offer grayscale on other traditional all in one Macintosh computers.

[@Filipcreate]

Love this comfy display series. It definitely proves that Apple was ahead of its time 👍

[@thenerd6192]

“You can have one window across two monitors”… more than you can have with a modern Mac!

[@3rdalbum]

I have the same itch to make a 68k-compatible Mac OS game. However I'm going to use Klik n Play. This will limit the type of games I can make but it'll be comparatively easy and quick to write, with no need to learn any more programming languages.

[@LukeTheJoker]

That is so awesome, never knew that existed! I am very curious what the cost of that set up would have been back then, I assume probably close to the cost of the SE30 by itself?

[@urbanstarship]

Hey, I had one of those in the 90s connected to a Mac IIcx.

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

On the “you’re supposed to use one of these deals” for a VGA-Mac adapter - nope. It came with a cable that had one connector on one end and the other on the other end. I got an SE/30+Pivot setup off Craigslist quite a few years ago. Other than the Pivot card and software,plus PageMaker 1.0 the SE/30 was 100% stock. Still running the original System 6.0.5, still with the stock 2 MB RAM.

[@ActionRetro]

thanks for this!

[@LabCat]

One of my co-workers has a Dell widescreen 27" in portrait mode so he can edit Word docs and PDFs in full-page view with the font at a reasonable size. If I spent most of my day looking at code snippets or ZSH / PowerShell scripts, it'd be perfect.

[@zombiegeek33]

was having a very bad day but your shenanigans made my day i love the over the top stuff you think to put together you are awesome and can always make a bad day good

[@themax4677]

I wish Microcenter was able to collect and resell ewaste for those of us in the Philly region. As far as I can tell, ewaste stores basically don't exist in a brick and mortar form. The recycler that takes from my employer sells via eBay but not in their physical location.

[@AndyDo]

Love the title reference. Heh. Heh. MEMORY IS RAM!

[@1-eye-willy]

Every news paper, magazine, book and publication from the late 80's to the mid 90's that was produced digitally was made with a monitor just like that

[@thedungeondelver]

The body for the Charge looks damn near identical to the failed Pono music player from the mid 2000s.

[@richardestes6499]

Neat. LGR has a video on his channel of the PC variant.

[@sandrodellisanti1139]

Ciao, this reminds me of 2002, to connect my used PM 7200 with my old VGA Monitor via Adapter haha will share your Video, Happy Weekend and we read us at Tribel, many greetings from brunswick in germany and please stay safe 🙃

[@kenfagerdotcom]

What a delightful retro romp.

[@AaronOfMpls]

Nice! Now I'm curious about the pivot mechanism in that monitor.

[@charlesdorval394]

SCSI Video card??? I had no idea that was a thing, you learn something everyday! :)

[@williama29]

LGR did a video on the exact same monitor and it uses mercury switches in it to tell if the monitor is in tatae mode

[@yyzkevin416]

Did you see that Ludacris display last night? The thing about Arsenal is they always try and walk it in.

[@zaxchannel2834]

3 Screens is something else, way cool

[@RogerCRocha]

The t-shirt made me giggle. 😄

[@LotoTheHero]

This is pretty dang cool! Can't wait to see the upgrade! :D

[@whophd]

Not only was the Radius Pivot a remarkable rotating screen in the age of CRT, it was also a widescreen CRT long before those were common, let alone widescreen flat panels

[@mr_rcollins]

512x384 😁 I remember when OS X went to 512x512 icons, and how they were higher resolution than the original Mac's entire screen.

[@Snickersnack329]

It HURT to start my day by hearing “512x324”

[@cruftist]

I remember selling the Radius Pivot. The B&W model was a hard sell due to the price. We had a color Pivot on the sales floor, nice. I think I still have some sales literature on it. Which BTW I previously offered you some AU/X documentation which I located but I have no way to contact you directly.

[@jonathanharding5103]

I would love to see you install and benchmark a 68060 in one of the macs that can support it.

[@LuisMercadoorg]

“I think I want to use this WRONG” Me, throwing away all the papers in my desk: OF COURSE HE DOES!

[@BilisNegra]

You're really building the sickest rigs to display in coming VCF events. Only downside is how are you going to lug all of that and have enough table space to show it.

[@savagepro9060]

0:19 Ludacris, the American rapper, has joined the chat

[@IkesVintageTech]

Love the SE/30, gotta fix mine and get cracking on the mystery GPU inside. Great vid!

[@hattree]

That monitor was sold for desktop publishing use.

[@TheDigitalOne]

Cool, classic and modern extend the display setup, with a little bit of classic software coding the display’s orientations should be able to function properly and that rotating monitor from back in the day is pretty cool and ahead of its time technology. I never seen one before, thanks for sharing. A modern day rotating monitor should be ideal with a Web Cam and Spermakers. Don’t think they make them quite yet! 😅😺🖥️⭐️💎

[@andrewdunbar828]

Think C! I'll watch that series!

[@Clyde-3195]

Unusual e-waste. I'll start using that name.

[@lovemadeinjapan]

13:20 You can drag the windows around in this control panel.

[@hydroponicgard]

Wouldn't it make sense to upgrade the CPU, so the triple monitor setup wouldn't chug? Or is that not possible on SE30/classic macs?

[@3rdalbum]

He actually owns an SE/30 with a 68040 upgrade card (an SE/40?) but I think it takes up the single expansion slot. If you're talking about installing a better 68030 directly in the CPU socket, dunno if that is possible, but also probably nobody wants to part with their '030s.