I was poor and using a secondhand "due to be thrown out" IBM 12" display (which despite being 12" had a colossal black border around the actual image on the screen, making the usable area even smaller than 12") and had a 486 DX2 whilst everyone else had Pentiums. I remember fumbling around to get my abysmal graphics card working under XFree86 whilst groping around magazines for appropriate commands and setting the configuration to various bad values that caused that monitor to make hellish screaming noises as I attempted to set it to a resolution and frequency higher than it could ever go.

I should have read the warning.