Get the latest tech news

I just want an 80×25 console, but that's no longer possible

Somehow along the way, a feature that I’ve had across DOS, OS/2, FreeBSD, and Linux — and has been present on PCs for more than 40 years — is gone. That feature, of course, is the 80×25 text console.

Somehow along the way, a feature that I’ve had across DOS, OS/2, FreeBSD, and Linux — and has been present on PCs for more than 40 years — is gone. This has been necessary because only PCs really had the 80×25 text mode (Raspberry Pis, for instance, never did), and even they don’t have it when booted with UEFI. The console is a different size on every screen — both in terms of size of letters and the dimensions of it If a given machine has more than one display, one or both of them will have parts of the console chopped off My system seems to run with three different resolutions or fonts at different points of the boot process.

Get the Android app