It wasn't just timings that were smoking monitors. It was invalid signals, even when the drivers were configured properly. No one 'fessed up to this, so no one knows if it was a broken driver issue or a brokern firmware issue.

I was working technical support for Nokia monitors at the time, so I know what I'm talking about. Plus, I was running Linux a lot, and XFree86 (the de-facto standard GUI for x86 Unices) allowed you to twiddle with timings way more than anyone's Windows driver, plus it allowed you to configure the scan rates of which your monitor was capable, so even if you plugged in a timing that would have smoked your monitor, it noticed and refused to do it, which is something that no Windows driver of the time would do. Not to mention being able to use non-standard resolutions, etc.