rmay635703 wrote on 2022-05-07, 23:45:
My guess is that in the Win3.x days you either got high resolution or you got color but not both,
Those who needed massive screens and resolutions likely couldn’t be bothered with color for their business apps.
Yes, I guess that might be true for home and office users. 🙂
I myself was used to 16c colour depth for a longer time in Windows 3.1 due to the lack of vendor drivers for the VGA.
Windows 95, later on, did run in 256c by default, due to its driver library.
All the basic Trident, OAK, Realtek, Paradise, Tseng, S3 drivers were included on Setup CD..
On the other hand, Windows 3.0 MME/3.1 really started rhe multimedia age in the early 90s (on PC).
DTP, CAD and photo editing were a thing in the 286 era, even.
I remember how my father showed me a Kodak Photo CD in 1994 or so.
We still have 90s era books about it in the book shelf.
Photo CD had pictures in a variety of resolutions going up to 1600x1200 in 16 million colours.
The professional versions for x-ray labs etc went even higher, to what we now call 4K or UHD.
And then there were MPEG applications.
CD-i, Video CD, video conferencing etc.
With Realmagic or WinTV cards, users could process NTSC/PAL/SECAM footage in the mid-90s, slightly before Win95 was omnipresent.
Edit: Technically, high resolution s and colour depths existed in the Windows 2.x days already, before VGA was common.
The IBM PGC could do 640x480 in 256c, for example.
Abd then there were graphics boards that had, say, 1024x768 256c drivers for Windows 2.x.
However, at the time, this was a niche market really. Definitely not "cannon" as far as our PC history is concerned.
Edit: Samples as a proof added.
Curiously, there also were Windows 1.x drivers, albeit in the Windows 2.x days (~'87 up)..
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