Working on a Vertical Monitor - Why Hasn't This Caught On?

It always seemed strange that computer screens were oriented horizontally. Back when computing was new and I was hunting and pecking on a hand-me-down IBM PC-AT, movies on a computer screen were still a far-fetched fantasy. Back then, all we had were letters: lines of code and the infinite scroll of hard-to-parse word processing text. DOS and UNIX, baby.

And no mice to help us navigate. Back then, we actually used the PgUp and PgDn keys! Anytime we could, we sent our words to our dot-matrix printers so we could read and revise them without straining our eyes. Buzz-buzz!

(Do you remember the stress-headaches of the amber monochrome monitor? Or maybe you were lucky enough to score one of the cool green ones.)

We were quite accustomed, at the time, to writing or typing on paper that was taller than it was wide. Since everything we did in our schools and offices had to be provided on these portrait-shaped rectangles, why the hell didn’t our newfangled computers orient the same way?

When we got into the era of desktop publishing, it seemed especially weird that the market wouldn’t provide a machine that could show a full page in it’s proper shape. Then web-pages came, with their infinite vertical scroll. Surely this called for a paradigm shift? Instead, the screens just kept getting wider and wider.

Now the question’s rendered moot by our phones and tablets. We can hold those things any way we damn well please. Hey – ever notice that most of us are reading and swiping in portrait mode?

Here’s the biggest irony of all: after 40+ years of computing on horizontal screens, people can take videos with their smart-phones to watch on those screens. And most of the time, they record them vertically. So we're stuck watching vertical videos in vertical Facebook feeds all shrunk down to fit on a horizontal monitor.

The world has gone mad.

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This week I was wandering through our local Salvation Army thrift store. Don’t ya know, they had a little monitor on sale for $16. The last thing I need is more dated computer stuff, but for some reason I took a look at it. First thing I noticed: this thing is damn heavy. It weighs as much as a manual typewriter. Second, it has a built in USB hub. I’m not sure that I’ll ever use more than four peripherals simultaneously, but it’s kind of cool to stick a thumb drive into my monitor instead of fumbling around the back of the laptop. I also noticed that the stand was pretty great. It telescopes up by a foot or so, and doesn’t wobble the way my massive 27” wide-screen does. I shook it vigorously to confirm this.

And that’s when I noticed something else. This monitor rotates.

I went against all my screaming anti-hoarder instincts and bought the damn thing. I mean, what’s sixteen dollars?

Now I can read a web-page with 25% less scrolling. I can edit vertically oriented pictures with ease. I can fit a whole typewritten page on the screen at a time.

(And when I’m facing down writer’s block and staring at the blank page, I can stare down the whole page all at once.)

It's especially handy with Steemit posts, because I can resize the tiny text-window into something that displays an entire post. Actually, Steemit's clean and simple layout looks brilliant this way.

It still feels kind of weird, though. I’m not sure I’m used to it yet.

Has anyone else found it easier to work with a horizontal monitor? Am I just being neurotic about this?