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In Memoriam: VGA (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: VGA is going away. It has been for a long time but the final nails in the coffin are being driven home this year. It was the first standard for video, and is by far the longest-lived port on the PC. The extra pins made computers monitor-aware; allowing data about the screen type and resolution to be queried whenever a display was connected. But the connector is big and looks antiquated. There's no place for it in today's thin, design minded devices. It is also a mechanism for analog signaling in our world that has embraced high-speed digital for ever increasing pixels and integration of more data passing through one connection. Most motherboards no longer have the connector, and Intel's new Skylake processors have removed native VGA functionality. Even online retailers have stopped including it as a filter option when choosing hardware.
It certainly has stopped being so popular but it isn't likely tl fade completely away for a long time. I still see it on monitors and TVs. These thin devices thst have no port usually have a display port that easily converts to vga with a cheap dongle.
"It was the first standard for video" - not quite
Perhaps NTSC monochrome RS-170 on a coax connector might be the first standard for video.
And even in the IBM PC world, monochrome and CGA were earlier.
Of course, perhaps the author of this article wasn't alive back then, and hasn't yet learned to "check your sources before publishing"
serial ports were around back when the power cable was still attached
hell serial ports predate computers
HDMI sucks:
HDMI is a horrid format; it was badly thought out and badly designed, and the failures of its design are so apparent that they could have been addressed and resolved with very little fuss. Why they weren't, exactly, is really anyone's guess, but the key has to be that the standard was not intended to provide a benefit to the consumer, but to such content providers as movie studios and the like. It would have been in the consumer's best interests to develop a standard that was robust and reliable over distance, that could be switched, amplified, and distributed economically, and that connects securely to devices; but the consumer's interests were, sadly, not really a priority for the developers of the HDMI standard. ... HDMI has presented a few problems. Unlike analog component video, the signal is not robust over distance because it was designed to run balanced when it should have been run unbalanced (SDI, the commercial digital video standard, can be run hundreds of feet over a single coax without any performance issues); the HDMI cable is a complicated rat's-nest arrangement involving nineteen conductors; switches, repeaters and distribution amplifiers for use with HDMI cable, by virtue of this complicated scheme, are made unnecessarily complicated and troublesome; and the HDMI cable plug is prone to falling out of the jack with the slightest tug. On the plus side, in the great majority of simple installations,
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Definitely a hackaday shill account. I got bored after looking through his first 45 submissions - it's all hackaday, all the time.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It was evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The EGA was its immediate predecessor and was pretty good, except for some reason the resolution didn't conform to the 4x3 aspect ratio which was standard at the time.
VGA came along with 640x480 res, which was decent. But within a couple years that was obsolete, so there came 800x600 (IBM later called that XGA) and then a succession of "Super VGA" "standards" (as in the joke, there are so many of them) all with different resolutions higher than 800x600, and some supporting wide aspect ratios.
BTW VGA also supported two low res, 256 color modes, mode 13h and Mode X, which became favorites of DOS gamers because they were well suited for smooth animation while not requiring exorbitant amounts of installed RAM.
'taint no such connector as a "DB-9." There's a DB-25, even a DB-37. There's also a DE-9 and a DE-15. But a DB-9 doesn't exist, despite what lots of people incorrectly call a DE-9.
To be honest, VGA (nor EGA, CGA, XGA etc) was not a "standard". VESA was a standard.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Of course I would say DB-9 has been far from ubiquitous for quite a few years. Most boards have a header for it (not much reason to not have that). Even in servers, they increasingly omit a physical connection (favoring instead using network to get serial port data).
Last generation of desktop computers I've routinely worked with at work, Dell Optiplex 7010, has DB-9 serial, and it looks like the 4th Quarter 2015 Dell Optiplex 7040 still has a DB-9 serial port as well.
I had to do firmware updates on some Fluke network testers last week. Admittedly these were slightly older models, but the update gave them the ability to identify 1G advertisement from the switch, to do in-line PoE voltage monitoring, to identify appliance/voice VLAN, and to do identify CDP from the switch. Doing this required the use of a serial cable with good old pins 2, 3, and 5 for receive, transmit, and ground respectively. It was harder to get the serial-part of the process going than it should have been, trying to use a serial-less Windows 8.1 laptop with adapters was a challenge and I finally ended up getting out a WYSE 52 terminal and null-modem cable to see if the software on the PC was actually sending anything out through Microsoft's weird wrappers on top of the keyspan USB to serial adapter, then establishing that yes, the software was talking, try to figure out why the scanner wasn't acknowledging. Turns out that was problems with the socket for the 2.5mm phono jack on the scanner itself.
Anyway, as much as some of us might like for RS-232 serial to be dead it doesn't look like we can write it off entirely any time soon, given the sheer expense of the kinds of devices that we have to support that use it. It's a lot easier to give up VGA because monitors, by and large, are not expensive, and even when they are there will still be methods to get analog video to them either through add-in cards or through conversion devices.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The connector is gone, but the need for something equivalent persists. Network, adapters etc are nice, but they are very complicated to use; complicated enough to require a device driver [stack], which implies a booted operating system.
Until the OS is booted, all those ports are dark, IOW, one cannot use them for debugging the boot process, or the (booting) loader and kernel. The IBM PC, as much as I despise it, makes using the serial port trivial, since the BIOS effectively has a device driver for it (although manually driving it isn't much of a big deal either).
It takes:
mov ah 1
mov al <char>
mov dx 0
int 14h
to vomit <char> out the serial port from 16-bit real mode (i.e. the mode the loader starts in)
So one way or another, a serial port (equivalent) will persist. It might get a little harder to access, though (e.g. some Android phones have their serial console going out the audio jack...), but it can't be done away with altogether.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Timothy is still here.
but one wouldn't be unjustified in claiming that the de facto DB9 is DB25 that has only the pins used by a PC serial port
Except that's not what the de facto use describes. DB denotes the shell size, commonly the one with 25 pins in it DB25. What people call "de facto DB9" is a DE shell size. Anyway you cut it the common usage is wrong.
At least it would be if the definition was regulated at all. Since it's not it's kind of hard to argue that a DB-9 isn't just another name for a DE-9 given how even manufacturers of connectors are using that nomenclature.