…back in the CRT era i needed at least a 72Hz refresh rate to not feel any discomfort; that doesn’t exactly correlate with framerates on modern LCD displays but i think it’s a good proxy for the threshold of general perceptiblity…
…are greater framerates smoother?..sure, especially in my peripheral vision, but 72 FPS is generally good-enough beyond which returns start diminishing…
…NCSA mosaic won the web, absolutely; in truth i think it gave a lot of us an excuse to upgrade from terminals and shell accounts…
…i remember going to our computer lab in the early nineties and seeing a flyer about this new protocol called the world wide web, thinking to myself in what way is that better than gopher?..
…can i reposition my taskbar?..no?..then it’s not the f*cking same…
…that’s the POWER model: the unit posted above is the consumer version with the SX chip, no math coprocessor and fewer function keys…
…NeXTstep was built on mach and, although i’m unsure if any antecedents remain in macOS, it was certainly production-ready in its day; i remember a couple of decades ago there were stopgap versions of the HURD built on top of mach instead of their own microkernel but i thought that was only ever intended as a temporary workaround…
…i presume on that basis that sustained developer interest was its greatest hurdle, no pun intended…
edit: …is this the post-mortem you mentioned?..
…i’m absolutely ignorant of its current state, but every time i’ve checked in on progress of GNU/hurd over the past three decades, it still hasn’t matured into a stable production-ready platform: i’m not sure if that’s an artifact of technical viability or developer interest…
…cleanest (and cheapest) solution is a passive HDMI-to-DVI cable: the video signals are identical, so it’s a trivial conversion…
…i’ve used this connection (from several different cable manufacturers) on many rigs…
…if you’re into paper books (and a hefty table) the DK complete world atlas includes a lot of geographic information, or if you prefer a dryer, more-authoritative presentation, the times world atlas is the grandaddy of the format…
…it looks like DK also offers a digital version of their previous editon…
(i have the millenium editions of both atlases, and they’re both fantastic tomes, but i think the DK complete atlas is more of what you’re looking for)