Re: WHY does the apple II have higher resolution horizontally?

[Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> wrote:
> On Monday, August 20, 2012 9:59:57 AM UTC-6, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>> On Mon, 20 Aug 2012, aiiadict@gmail.com wrote:
>>> 
>>> 280X192.  TV does the same too.  VGA, SVGA, etc.  Did the designers have 
>>> higher resolution sight in the horizontal direction?
>> 
>> Standard televisions are wider than they are tall.
> 
> I would ALMOST be willing to guarantee that every computer and TV display
> is that way. Widescreen TVs / displays are of course even "worse". Even
> the screens on things like TV recorders, digital wristwatches, microwave
> ovens, etc. all tend to be "landscape" orientation.
> 
> It's only really with the invention of devices like mobile phones, iPads,
> and iPods that displays started becoming more common in "portrait"
> orientation (taller than they are wide), and many of those device can be
> turned sideways in use.
> 
> Most book, newspaper, magazine pages are printed in portrait orientation,
> but when you open them up to a double-spread they are often in "landscape"
> too.
> 
> Possibly it's something to do with the anatomy of the human eye - perhaps
> the eye (without moving your head) can scan horizontally for a further
> distance than it can vertically. The human eye does also tend to be wider
> than it is tall.

Exactly. 

Evolution has produced our "widescreen" visual system, no doubt because it
is better suited to seeing both threats and opportunities. 

NTSC chose to have approximately equal resolutions in both horizontal and
vertical directions, and adopted a 4:3 aspect ratio because the movies did.

The movies naturally have equal horizontal and vertical resolutions with
cylindrically symmetric optics, and they picked 4:3 because it is a better
match to our field of view.  Before movies, the theater also used a
horizontal rectangle as the common proscenium. 

A different, more Apple-related question is why the Apple II pixels are not
"square", and the answer to that is related to clock speeds and color
subcarrier frequencies. 

-michael - NadaNet 3.1 and AppleCrate II: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon