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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.

5 of 406 comments (clear)

  1. Eventually... But not yet by oic0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. not first standard by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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"

  3. Re:HDMI=mostly disadvantages by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Informative

    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,

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    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  4. Re:TIMMAY!!!!!! by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 5, Informative

    Definitely a hackaday shill account. I got bored after looking through his first 45 submissions - it's all hackaday, all the time.

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    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  5. Re:It was the first standard for video? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.