Video modes and college silliness (Was: IBM 5155 Portable

On Thu, 28 Aug 2014, Chuck Guzis wrote: Many programs detected video type and used lots of color if they saw CGA. In cases of a B&W monitor on a CGA card (such as roomfuls in the college computer lab), that was often horribly unusable. And in machines with BOTH video cards, it failed to comply with what the user had chosen to use. And rarely, a user had both cards, but monitor connected to only one. Since that program was text ONLY, I looked at the current mode. If the mode was 7, then I used B&W at 0xB000. Mode 2 or 3 was 0xB800, but mode 2 meant that the user did not want color. AND, like Chuck, I added a command line option. With a little bit of additional circuitry, . . . wouldn't that be enough to enable the user to select whatever chartreuse on lavender color scheme that they wanted for monochrome? BTW, when I say "B&W", I am referring to the signal, not the phosphor color. We used to have serious problems with the terminology. At the college, for teaching programming (FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal, BASIC, 8086 family assembly, etc.), we did not need graphics nor color (no "256 Color accounting"). But, hanging cheap aftermarket composite monitors (such as Taxan) on CGA cards saved us enough money V IBM "Monochrome" on IBM MDP, to enable us to have a substantial number of additional computers. (aftermarket IBM Monochrome compatible monitors and clones of the Hercules video card (a copy of the IBM MDP with pixel control) were not yet available). For the price of an IBM monitor, we could get TEN of the cheap but usable Taxans, in a random mix of green and "amber". But, when we went to buy the cheap B&W composite monitors, some vendors would insist that "B&W" meant WHITE phosphor (at a higher price) and that "MONOCHROME" meant MDP/Hercules compatible. What name can you use when you don't give a shit about phosphor color, but want the cheapest "composite" monitor, without full color? And many of us began to use "Hercules" as a term that was more difficult for people to deliberately misinterpret (not really an issue of ambiguity) than "IBM Monochrome compatible". We also tried to also have ONE CGA color, and one IBM MONOCHROME in each room (some students and "teachers" INSISTED on using the color machines for their B&W text processing). For example, later, the guy teaching a "Unix Command Line" course DEMANDED VGA and color, and we eventually populated one room with VGA cards driving "Hercules" monitors. But using minimum machines in order to have ENOUGH machines did not go over well with all. When one of our lab rooms was re-assigned to the business department for taching accounting classes, they DEMANDED color monitors on the VGA cards, which resulted in putting half of the machines in the closet and instituting a waiting list for use of the few remaining "acceptable" machines. And one of our administrators was pushing VERY HARD to trade in 50 of our 386 machines for 4 486 machines. Meanwhile, when the administrators upgraded their word processors from 486 to Pentium, they would not give us the 486 machines, because they were getting a trade-in credit of $100 each for them. Earlier, one of our administrators had the TRS80 model 3s upgraded to model 4s, at a cost per machine that was only slightly higher than the purchase price of a model 4.