Back when I was in high school in the late 80s/early 90s we had a few computers with a grey-scale monitor that could be rotated between landscape and portrait orientation. Do you know what happened when we'd do that? You'd hear the clack of a mechanical orientation sensor, the screen would momentarily blank, and then the orientation of the display would automatically update. Which isn't a shock to anyone who has used late model PDAs and just about every tablet and smart phone. How is it that today, when all but the cheapest desktop monitor stands allow you to rotate the monitor, we have to manually tell the computer we've rotated the monitor?
Okay, yes, this is because back then that was a premium and pricey monitor which is why only the vo-tech computer class had even two of them in the entire school (we also had an analog camera that recorded to disk, not a Kodak disc film camera but an SLR camera which used a camcorder sensor and recorded single frames of analog NTSC to magnetic 2 or maybe they were 2.5 inch disks. The drive for these disks was as large as the Mac it was plugged into). So throwing a sensor onto the monitor wasn't that expensive when we were already getting charged a premium for it. But would it kill them to include it on the less than bargain basement monitors today? Although now I'm wondering if DisplayPort/DVI/etc even have a way in their standards to pass along orientation information or if you'd need a separate connection, a quick googling isn't finding anything promising about that.
Anyway, just a quick rant to get that out. I do in fact feel better having done so.
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