21 Jan
2006
21 Jan
'06
11:39 a.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
Oh come on. Photogrpahs are notoriously bad at preserving colours. And
although I don't have a digital camera, I've seen reference to white
balance adjustments on most (if not all) of them. Get that wrong and
brown could easily look yellow.
Heck, I am sure a bit of fiddling with GIMP or Photoshop or whatever
could do much the same thing.
Or of course his 5153 could have been tweaked (there are drive and cutoff
adjustments for the 3 guns, a bit less red gain (or a bit more green)
could make brown look like dark yellow (effectively undoing the effects
of that circuit). Or there could be a fault in that particular monitor
(maybe the transistor has failed or something.
Oh for %deity's sake....
Believe me, I feel the same way. I'm just trying to convince a stubborn
person.
I feel the onus is on the original questioner to
provide documentary
He has digital photos of a 5153 that isn't performing the extra
conversion, which is what started this entire mess. Regardless, I'm not going to pursue it further
(someone humorously
referred to me as "charging the CGA windmill" :-), although someday I
would like to know *why* IBM went through the trouble. Some engineer
has probably taken it to his grave.
Every year I give a little talk to HPCC (Handheld and Portable Computer
Club about the internals of one or more HP calculators/computers). Often,
after explaining some clever feature [1] I am asked 'why did HP do this'. To
which my reply is always the same : ' I can only tell you what's inside
the machine, not why it was put there. The former is deducable by taking
the thing apart and probing around. The latter needs access to the
designers'.
[1] An example is the beeper circuit on the 9830. It's a single
frequency, single duration beep. You give the circuit a pulse from the
I/O interface card, it gives a beep.
The 'extra' feature is a few extra components to give an amplitude
envelope to tbe output sound, just to make it sound a bit nicer. Well,
it _is_ an HP :-).
-tony