On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 01:05:47AM -0700, Randall R Schulz wrote:
Allen,
On Wednesday 27 April 2005 19:24, Allen wrote:
...
Mmmm, I don't remember exactly, long years have passed; but I know that one of the earliest MsDos virus (80s vintage) was said to destroy the monitor. Could be a false rumour, though: I never tried it to check!
I thought it was the video card that was damaged by out-of-bounds timing settings?
This was long before my time but I collect things like that on floppy. I have some that does in fact destroy hardware.
If you want to totally destroy a monitor that's easy. The DOS way probably worked similar because back then more monitors were not protected from high frequencys they didn't support. I imagine it worked this way, I can only guess though, considering I was like 2 years old.
In those days, there weren't any (well, not many, anyway) multi-sync monitors, so only a narrow range of drive frequencies would sync. It's not hard to imagine that grossly out-of-tolerance signals would drive some components to generate more heat then than they could dissipate.
As I said I wasn't around for it but I've heard some lovely horror stories about monitors actually catching fire. I haven't ever watched this happen but with how hot a monitor can get, I can only imagine ... heh.
Randall Schulz
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