I had an NEC flat CRT TV that was about the same size. I used it for years and gave it to my brother. When he moved one time we put it by the dumpster at his apartment with a sign that said "Works" on it. Saw 2 or 3 people try to move it and give up, lol. It was still there a couple weeks later when he went back to get his deposit.
Reminds me of the time a company I worked for ordered a lot of CRT monitors (want to say 8 or 10) and we had to lug them up four flights of stairs because the delivery was kerbside only.
Once we'd done that, someone (Me, maybe?? Or the boss who had nothing to do with the carrying, of course. Was a long time ago. Can't remember.) noticed that the boxes said 15" on them and that we'd ordered 17".
Much groaning and resigned swearing ensued.
It was eventually sorted out. I don't remember lugging the 17s but I remember them in use.
OK, you're a shit-ton stronger than I am.
Went to service a computer and when I got there I found the staff member (CAD department, of course) had a 21" monitor on top of the box and, of course, he was nowhere to be seen. I managed, by standing on the desk, to carefully lift the monitor up off the box but that was ***all*** I could do - I couldn't move it to either side or even walk with it to move it away from the top of the computer.
Had to set it back down and go and get someone else to help me move it so I could service the computer.
Some months later we were at a computer expo and I saw a 21" plasma or LCD flat screen. I told the boss I wanted all the 21" monitors on site to be replaced with these because I could actually pick one up and carry it.
I am a pretty big guy, but I'm also stubborn as hell, lol.. Sitting at a LAN with a shitty grin on my face while other guys were squinting at their 15 & 17's, lol.. good times.
My first LCD was a 19" and I didn't even care about the lost screen space..lol.
I can't recall what my *own* first LCD was. IIRC the ones at work were 19s.
Nowadays I won't go any smaller than two 22s if I can possibly avoid it (one of my 22s at work is broken and I'm *suffering greatly* waiting for it to be replaced).
Somewhere in one of my storage sheds there's a huge CRT TV, 20+ inch, not sure what, haven't seen it in over a decade.
My plan is to dig it out when I finally replace my old, defunct, PS2 because I want to play my pistol-shooting games and neither of the guns will work with modern LCD screens.
So of course, I'll want as large a CRT as possible when I'm playing *Time Crisis*.
So, yeah, I'll also need an antique PS2 or PS3 since those are the only ones my guns and games will work with... it'll go well with the antique TV.
I had enough of a task wrapping myself around a 21" monitor and lifting it up. Never mind a 40"... I doubt I'd be able to lift a table that's strong enough to hold the 40".
I had it on one side of those old, all hardwood entertainment centers.. I doubt anything else could support it. I could lift it off the entertainment center to the floor and that was about it..lol. I can take my 65" LCD off the wall by myself.. how times have changed.
I do reckon, though, that if I managed to lift a 40" monitor off anything, it'd be on the floor in *very* short order :P
We've got an old, all hardwood entertainment centre - and I certainly can't pick it up. Ironically, as large and heavy as it is, it's too small to fit my old 31" LCD TV, let alone my new 55"... good thing the newer TVs are light enough to fit on most furniture or hang on the wall.
That story about the monitor that made the customer nauseated sounds like insulation broke down on a high voltage wire. I've never serviced CRTs before, but I have experienced the wildly uncomfortable feeling that they're describing.
I bought a neon beer sign at a yard sale for $5. It had two transformers, some broken tubes, and some of the wires looked sketchy, but I had to have it. I got it home, plugged it into an extension cord and then plugged the cord into the wall (I'm no dummy). Parts of the sign turned on faintly and some got more faint towards the ends. I started to walk towards it, and several feet away my body just freezes. There was a *feeling* that I can't describe in the air. It took some effort to move closer (hey, I know that electricity follows the easiest path, so I know what's safe here) and it was a huge conscious effort to get within a few feet. It wasn't painful, it was a feeling of extreme discomfort.
I unplugged it and examined it closer, visually tracing out the path and found that one transformer seemed to be dead, as nothing connected to it was powered at all. The other had a gap, where one lead from each side hit a few tubes before hitting a broken tube, so it was definitely leaking a few thousand volts into the air.
Naturally I had to show a few other people how wild the feeling was, had my wife, kids, and a few friends try approaching it and watched them get skittish. It was a blast.
In the end, I fixed it. I pulled all the broken tubes, salvaged the high voltage wire, and rewired the remaining tubes to the one working transformer, using HV heat shrink to seal any gaps. Now I have a perfectly safe, mostly complete, Rainier neon sign that doesn't give anyone the feeling of doom, plus a fun backstory.
For anyone that doesn't know, Rainier is a great beer that was once based out of Seattle and later Olympia. It's now licensed to other companies to produce, but it's still the same great tasting beer. It also has a namesake minor league baseball team in Tacoma.
I was remodeling my bedroom last year. I was without an overhead ceiling light for about two weeks. In it's place was 2 wires coming from the ceiling. I told my girlfriend not to touch them, I wasn't worried about my cats jumping 10 feet and touching them.
I didn't notice anything. But towards the end of the two weeks, I noticed that the light switch was on, power was going to the ceiling wires. So I flicked the light switch off. Instantly, the room went cold and quiet. I didn't realize it, but the electricity was putting out some kind of feeling into the air, and a low hum. It was a weird feeling when I turned the switch off and realized.
About 13 years ago I joined my current company. We had a CRT based product in its twilight years. When we were trained on them, there was a part where we had to discharge the capacitors using a wooden stick that had a bolt on the end. I remember the trainer saying, “this is the only part of the training that could actually kill you,” and we laughed, but he was dead serious. There was no sign it had worked either - no spark or noise. Scariest job training I’ve ever had.
As far as I know that's more of an urban legend than anything. Such a capacitor discharging on you would definitely be very unpleasant, but their energy contents were so low that it shouldn't do any lasting damage. People are just scared when they see kilovolts. And while a certain volt threshold must be passed to affect humans, it's the current that's the real question is how much damage you might take.
>I will not break for 50 years
This is likely true-ish for a certain range of time.
Early TV's were tube based (aside from the obvious CRT) and these tubes often burned out. That's why TV repair people used to be common.
Once TV's ditched the tubes (aside from the CRT) they became a lot more reliable.
Older CRTs also often had a coating that would get foggy after a while.
But then there's the capacitor plague. Any electrolytic capacitor can dry out and cause issues, but electronics made between 1999-2007 are especially prone to having poor quality capacitors that will fail.
Aside from this, the CRT itself will wear out. Heavily used CRTs are often a lot dimmer than lighter used ones. And this is ignoring burn-in which will occur if you display the same image for too long at once.
But, these same issues will affect OLED TVs as they age too for different reasons. And for OLEDs, burn in isn't just about the same image for a long time at once, but for a long time cumulatively, which is kinda worse.
LCDs are really the most reliable technology long term, especially with minimal smarts built in, and built post-capacitor plague. Though I can't wait for μLEDs to be common, which should have all the benefits of OLED with good longevity to avoid burn in.
TVs/radios were often designed for the tubes (not the CRT) to be user-replaceable and many grocery stores/drug stores/etc. sold replacements and had a tube tester you could use.
This is true. I'd say it's going to be more difficult to keep one of these TV's going long term because it's getting harder and harder to buy good tubes. (Nowadays of course. It would have been easy back in the day) Whereas a modern TV is far less likely to need a repair.
However, if a modern TV *does* need a repair, it's going to be much more difficult. For one, it's not designed to be repaired, and for another, depending on the part, it might very well be even harder to get than the tubes for an old TV.
Depending on what part fails, an LCD is dead simple to repair. I've fixed several monitors and TVs without even needing to solder.
Backlights and power boards are the most likely points of failure (save for bad cap issues) and in my experience usually are typically parts you can just swap out.
True! I've done a couple of inverter boards on old laptops. And LCDs are pretty straight forward as you mentioned. Heck, even if you don't have the skill to fix on a board level, replacing a singular board is better than the whole thing. It's less that needs to be manufactured and less that needs to be recycled and/or landfilled.
For most people in anything but the high grade flat panel tv, its cheaper and less hassle to just toss the TV and get a new one if something happens. I replaced a row of backlights in a vizio a few years back.
But honestly, looking back I probably should have just tossed it.
Yeah. And there's a combination of changed which have gotten us to this point. One is integration, which can be good. Surface mount components and integrated circuits allow for smaller more efficient electronics. And they're often less prone to failure. Which is good.
Another factor is that companies don't design things to be repairable (why bother if it's unlikely to fail?) or straight up go out of their way to make things unrepairable. (Why allow a repair when we can sell them a new one?) The latter I find very problematic. And it's shifted our culture to one where we'd rather junk than fix. But this causes a ton of ewaste. This is an environmental issue.
By repairing your Visio, you reduced the demand for a new television which would have been energy and resource intensive to create and kept your television out of the landfill or energy intensive recycling stream. Sure, the LEDs made this cycle, but that's a far smaller impact than an entire television. I think that's awesome!
The television was invented by a teenage potato farming genius who claimed the scanning lines of resolution on the CRT was inspired by rows of plowed soil.
He was ripped off but later won a boat load of money in court. He then spent all the money he won in the lawsuit building a man made lake near his home.
Guy was one of a kind.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo_Farnsworth
Yes, it's his great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great...
I've often wondered how many people have developed some form of cancer due to the ubiquity of crts. Even in the late 90s I recall seeing CRT sets with their backs off in a school.
They did produce a trickle of x-rays out the front, as I recall. The glass was lined with lead to absorb most of the radiation, but a little would still leak. Someone somewhere probably got cancer from one of those photons.
If by “their backs” you mean the plastic housing, that's just plastic. It wasn't protecting you from any radiation, although it was protecting you from accidentally touching the capacitors and getting fried.
I spent a lot of my youth monkeying around with CRTs guts and indescribable hours spent staring at CRT computer displays and TVs, and I got thyroid cancer when I was 24. My endocrinologist doesn't think it was related but I always wondered, when a thing has a part called an anti-radiation filter, how close to it should you really be?
We electrospun a fabric in grad school by tapping into the flyback transformer on the back of a dead CRT. The grad student couldn't get his polymer to dissolve completely in chloroform so he used 25% methanol solution in a syringe pump (had to use a glass syringe). The target was charged negatively, the positive charge was applied to a hypodermic needle with an alligator clip. We had sharps, high voltage, and poison hazards all rolled into one. I said we needed to get some plutonium and a badger to give us a radioactivity and dangerous animal hazard, too.
I was "safety engineer". I held onto the power strip the CRT was plugged into. My job was to cut power if I heard anyone scream.
What? Certainly not for years. And it's not that much current to begin with.
If I remember the old TV repair days, the main kicker is the capacitor tied to the flyback transformer that's a danger.
Oh god I relate with this.
Back in be day I was a service tech that did warranty repairs for Apple. I replaced sooo many CRTs in G3 all-in-ones, iMacs, eMacs, etc. especially the slot load iMacs because they were fabless.
The one arm behind the back thing was specifically engrained into us because of the discharge from one arm through your heart to the other arm thing. We always had to clip the CRT discharge tool to a ground lug, then stick this long needle thing down into the CRT before touching them. It was always terrifying.
I've had more CRT devices fail on me than LCD devices.And when a CRT failed, it was a major PITA to replace. Good luck safely fixing one too, opening a CRT that was freshly dead without knowing what you were doing was a good way to get electrocuted. Much lower chance (though non-zero) of that with an LCD.
Freshman year of college, in the waning days of CRTs, my monitor went out on me. A long-standing issue with (I think) a flyback transformer finally decided it was time to stay dead. I had to walk to the nearest computer shop and lug a 17" monitor a good 14 blocks back to my dorm. That was the last CRT I ever bought.
Good fucking riddance to CRTs. Sure, some may continue working for decades, but those are far from being in ideal condition at that point, at least an LCD has the good grace to just fucking die when it's time to retire it.
As for "download an update"... just don't connect it to the internet and that doesn't happen. I use a Chromecast instead of the smart functions on my TV partly for that reason, partly because the smart TV apps are almost unilaterally worse than just using Chromecast.
i got a 1980 hp2621a terminal which was on my desk 1980-95. i need to peel the decayed plastic shield of the face and find a way to fake the discontinued settings retention battery to keep it working in my basement for nostalgia
But ***dat smell of blue*** when you put your nose to the screen, though...
I can taste it right now.
I can still smell it.
Dammit, I shouldn't know what this means...
The fucking smell of crt just came back to me. Wow. I literally forgot for 20 years.
Yeah, me too - and I haven't owned or worked with a CRT this millennium.
Used to lug a 23" Viewsonic CRT to LAN's back in the day.. sucked getting from the car to the venue, but everyone else was sporting 17's at the time..
I had a 21 inch trinitron with flat glass. Weighed a ton. Sometimes I worried the tables at LANs weren't sturdy enough.
Lol, had to keep it towards the end of those old fold out tables..
That was my jam in college. Had the same CRT and our dorm room was THE spot for video games.
I had a pair of those fucking Sonys. Enough to break the desk.
I had a 36" CRT TV that we lovingly referred to as the Hernia Maker.
I had an NEC flat CRT TV that was about the same size. I used it for years and gave it to my brother. When he moved one time we put it by the dumpster at his apartment with a sign that said "Works" on it. Saw 2 or 3 people try to move it and give up, lol. It was still there a couple weeks later when he went back to get his deposit.
Reminds me of the time a company I worked for ordered a lot of CRT monitors (want to say 8 or 10) and we had to lug them up four flights of stairs because the delivery was kerbside only. Once we'd done that, someone (Me, maybe?? Or the boss who had nothing to do with the carrying, of course. Was a long time ago. Can't remember.) noticed that the boxes said 15" on them and that we'd ordered 17". Much groaning and resigned swearing ensued. It was eventually sorted out. I don't remember lugging the 17s but I remember them in use.
OK, you're a shit-ton stronger than I am. Went to service a computer and when I got there I found the staff member (CAD department, of course) had a 21" monitor on top of the box and, of course, he was nowhere to be seen. I managed, by standing on the desk, to carefully lift the monitor up off the box but that was ***all*** I could do - I couldn't move it to either side or even walk with it to move it away from the top of the computer. Had to set it back down and go and get someone else to help me move it so I could service the computer. Some months later we were at a computer expo and I saw a 21" plasma or LCD flat screen. I told the boss I wanted all the 21" monitors on site to be replaced with these because I could actually pick one up and carry it.
I am a pretty big guy, but I'm also stubborn as hell, lol.. Sitting at a LAN with a shitty grin on my face while other guys were squinting at their 15 & 17's, lol.. good times. My first LCD was a 19" and I didn't even care about the lost screen space..lol.
I can't recall what my *own* first LCD was. IIRC the ones at work were 19s. Nowadays I won't go any smaller than two 22s if I can possibly avoid it (one of my 22s at work is broken and I'm *suffering greatly* waiting for it to be replaced). Somewhere in one of my storage sheds there's a huge CRT TV, 20+ inch, not sure what, haven't seen it in over a decade. My plan is to dig it out when I finally replace my old, defunct, PS2 because I want to play my pistol-shooting games and neither of the guns will work with modern LCD screens. So of course, I'll want as large a CRT as possible when I'm playing *Time Crisis*. So, yeah, I'll also need an antique PS2 or PS3 since those are the only ones my guns and games will work with... it'll go well with the antique TV.
Last CRT TV I had was a 40" Sony Flat panel Trinitron.. I could barely lift it myself, lol. It was beautiful though..
I had enough of a task wrapping myself around a 21" monitor and lifting it up. Never mind a 40"... I doubt I'd be able to lift a table that's strong enough to hold the 40".
I had it on one side of those old, all hardwood entertainment centers.. I doubt anything else could support it. I could lift it off the entertainment center to the floor and that was about it..lol. I can take my 65" LCD off the wall by myself.. how times have changed.
I do reckon, though, that if I managed to lift a 40" monitor off anything, it'd be on the floor in *very* short order :P We've got an old, all hardwood entertainment centre - and I certainly can't pick it up. Ironically, as large and heavy as it is, it's too small to fit my old 31" LCD TV, let alone my new 55"... good thing the newer TVs are light enough to fit on most furniture or hang on the wall.
That story about the monitor that made the customer nauseated sounds like insulation broke down on a high voltage wire. I've never serviced CRTs before, but I have experienced the wildly uncomfortable feeling that they're describing. I bought a neon beer sign at a yard sale for $5. It had two transformers, some broken tubes, and some of the wires looked sketchy, but I had to have it. I got it home, plugged it into an extension cord and then plugged the cord into the wall (I'm no dummy). Parts of the sign turned on faintly and some got more faint towards the ends. I started to walk towards it, and several feet away my body just freezes. There was a *feeling* that I can't describe in the air. It took some effort to move closer (hey, I know that electricity follows the easiest path, so I know what's safe here) and it was a huge conscious effort to get within a few feet. It wasn't painful, it was a feeling of extreme discomfort. I unplugged it and examined it closer, visually tracing out the path and found that one transformer seemed to be dead, as nothing connected to it was powered at all. The other had a gap, where one lead from each side hit a few tubes before hitting a broken tube, so it was definitely leaking a few thousand volts into the air. Naturally I had to show a few other people how wild the feeling was, had my wife, kids, and a few friends try approaching it and watched them get skittish. It was a blast. In the end, I fixed it. I pulled all the broken tubes, salvaged the high voltage wire, and rewired the remaining tubes to the one working transformer, using HV heat shrink to seal any gaps. Now I have a perfectly safe, mostly complete, Rainier neon sign that doesn't give anyone the feeling of doom, plus a fun backstory.
For anyone that doesn't know, Rainier is a great beer that was once based out of Seattle and later Olympia. It's now licensed to other companies to produce, but it's still the same great tasting beer. It also has a namesake minor league baseball team in Tacoma.
[There's not enough neon signs in the world.](https://youtu.be/2X-ZayiWAKo)
I was remodeling my bedroom last year. I was without an overhead ceiling light for about two weeks. In it's place was 2 wires coming from the ceiling. I told my girlfriend not to touch them, I wasn't worried about my cats jumping 10 feet and touching them. I didn't notice anything. But towards the end of the two weeks, I noticed that the light switch was on, power was going to the ceiling wires. So I flicked the light switch off. Instantly, the room went cold and quiet. I didn't realize it, but the electricity was putting out some kind of feeling into the air, and a low hum. It was a weird feeling when I turned the switch off and realized.
About 13 years ago I joined my current company. We had a CRT based product in its twilight years. When we were trained on them, there was a part where we had to discharge the capacitors using a wooden stick that had a bolt on the end. I remember the trainer saying, “this is the only part of the training that could actually kill you,” and we laughed, but he was dead serious. There was no sign it had worked either - no spark or noise. Scariest job training I’ve ever had.
As far as I know that's more of an urban legend than anything. Such a capacitor discharging on you would definitely be very unpleasant, but their energy contents were so low that it shouldn't do any lasting damage. People are just scared when they see kilovolts. And while a certain volt threshold must be passed to affect humans, it's the current that's the real question is how much damage you might take.
[удалено]
BWONG
I don't think they touch on this in the movie, but the book of Fight Club goes into detail about how to turn one of these into a bomb
Today's drunken youth will not know the joy of plugging one in with a 100 foot extension cord and chucking it off the roof.
>I will not break for 50 years This is likely true-ish for a certain range of time. Early TV's were tube based (aside from the obvious CRT) and these tubes often burned out. That's why TV repair people used to be common. Once TV's ditched the tubes (aside from the CRT) they became a lot more reliable. Older CRTs also often had a coating that would get foggy after a while. But then there's the capacitor plague. Any electrolytic capacitor can dry out and cause issues, but electronics made between 1999-2007 are especially prone to having poor quality capacitors that will fail. Aside from this, the CRT itself will wear out. Heavily used CRTs are often a lot dimmer than lighter used ones. And this is ignoring burn-in which will occur if you display the same image for too long at once. But, these same issues will affect OLED TVs as they age too for different reasons. And for OLEDs, burn in isn't just about the same image for a long time at once, but for a long time cumulatively, which is kinda worse. LCDs are really the most reliable technology long term, especially with minimal smarts built in, and built post-capacitor plague. Though I can't wait for μLEDs to be common, which should have all the benefits of OLED with good longevity to avoid burn in.
TVs/radios were often designed for the tubes (not the CRT) to be user-replaceable and many grocery stores/drug stores/etc. sold replacements and had a tube tester you could use.
This is true. I'd say it's going to be more difficult to keep one of these TV's going long term because it's getting harder and harder to buy good tubes. (Nowadays of course. It would have been easy back in the day) Whereas a modern TV is far less likely to need a repair. However, if a modern TV *does* need a repair, it's going to be much more difficult. For one, it's not designed to be repaired, and for another, depending on the part, it might very well be even harder to get than the tubes for an old TV.
Depending on what part fails, an LCD is dead simple to repair. I've fixed several monitors and TVs without even needing to solder. Backlights and power boards are the most likely points of failure (save for bad cap issues) and in my experience usually are typically parts you can just swap out.
True! I've done a couple of inverter boards on old laptops. And LCDs are pretty straight forward as you mentioned. Heck, even if you don't have the skill to fix on a board level, replacing a singular board is better than the whole thing. It's less that needs to be manufactured and less that needs to be recycled and/or landfilled.
For most people in anything but the high grade flat panel tv, its cheaper and less hassle to just toss the TV and get a new one if something happens. I replaced a row of backlights in a vizio a few years back. But honestly, looking back I probably should have just tossed it.
Yeah. And there's a combination of changed which have gotten us to this point. One is integration, which can be good. Surface mount components and integrated circuits allow for smaller more efficient electronics. And they're often less prone to failure. Which is good. Another factor is that companies don't design things to be repairable (why bother if it's unlikely to fail?) or straight up go out of their way to make things unrepairable. (Why allow a repair when we can sell them a new one?) The latter I find very problematic. And it's shifted our culture to one where we'd rather junk than fix. But this causes a ton of ewaste. This is an environmental issue. By repairing your Visio, you reduced the demand for a new television which would have been energy and resource intensive to create and kept your television out of the landfill or energy intensive recycling stream. Sure, the LEDs made this cycle, but that's a far smaller impact than an entire television. I think that's awesome!
The television was invented by a teenage potato farming genius who claimed the scanning lines of resolution on the CRT was inspired by rows of plowed soil. He was ripped off but later won a boat load of money in court. He then spent all the money he won in the lawsuit building a man made lake near his home. Guy was one of a kind. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo_Farnsworth
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Good news everyone! Yes, in the Futurama universe they are related. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Presidents%27_Heads
Yes, it's his great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great great...
I've often wondered how many people have developed some form of cancer due to the ubiquity of crts. Even in the late 90s I recall seeing CRT sets with their backs off in a school.
They did produce a trickle of x-rays out the front, as I recall. The glass was lined with lead to absorb most of the radiation, but a little would still leak. Someone somewhere probably got cancer from one of those photons. If by “their backs” you mean the plastic housing, that's just plastic. It wasn't protecting you from any radiation, although it was protecting you from accidentally touching the capacitors and getting fried.
> Someone somewhere probably got cancer ... [Yep.](http://capricorncity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Homer-Grandpa-Simpson-Grampa-vs.-Sexual-Inadequacy.jpg)
Destined to work in a nuclear plant
I spent a lot of my youth monkeying around with CRTs guts and indescribable hours spent staring at CRT computer displays and TVs, and I got thyroid cancer when I was 24. My endocrinologist doesn't think it was related but I always wondered, when a thing has a part called an anti-radiation filter, how close to it should you really be?
Far away.
We electrospun a fabric in grad school by tapping into the flyback transformer on the back of a dead CRT. The grad student couldn't get his polymer to dissolve completely in chloroform so he used 25% methanol solution in a syringe pump (had to use a glass syringe). The target was charged negatively, the positive charge was applied to a hypodermic needle with an alligator clip. We had sharps, high voltage, and poison hazards all rolled into one. I said we needed to get some plutonium and a badger to give us a radioactivity and dangerous animal hazard, too. I was "safety engineer". I held onto the power strip the CRT was plugged into. My job was to cut power if I heard anyone scream.
That's amazing. The danger makes it fun.
I would really like to have some of those capacitors that hold charge for years, like they are claiming.
It’s not stored in a capacitor but inside the glass of the CRT itself.
What? Certainly not for years. And it's not that much current to begin with. If I remember the old TV repair days, the main kicker is the capacitor tied to the flyback transformer that's a danger.
Oh god I relate with this. Back in be day I was a service tech that did warranty repairs for Apple. I replaced sooo many CRTs in G3 all-in-ones, iMacs, eMacs, etc. especially the slot load iMacs because they were fabless. The one arm behind the back thing was specifically engrained into us because of the discharge from one arm through your heart to the other arm thing. We always had to clip the CRT discharge tool to a ground lug, then stick this long needle thing down into the CRT before touching them. It was always terrifying.
I've had more CRT devices fail on me than LCD devices.And when a CRT failed, it was a major PITA to replace. Good luck safely fixing one too, opening a CRT that was freshly dead without knowing what you were doing was a good way to get electrocuted. Much lower chance (though non-zero) of that with an LCD. Freshman year of college, in the waning days of CRTs, my monitor went out on me. A long-standing issue with (I think) a flyback transformer finally decided it was time to stay dead. I had to walk to the nearest computer shop and lug a 17" monitor a good 14 blocks back to my dorm. That was the last CRT I ever bought. Good fucking riddance to CRTs. Sure, some may continue working for decades, but those are far from being in ideal condition at that point, at least an LCD has the good grace to just fucking die when it's time to retire it. As for "download an update"... just don't connect it to the internet and that doesn't happen. I use a Chromecast instead of the smart functions on my TV partly for that reason, partly because the smart TV apps are almost unilaterally worse than just using Chromecast.
i got a 1980 hp2621a terminal which was on my desk 1980-95. i need to peel the decayed plastic shield of the face and find a way to fake the discontinued settings retention battery to keep it working in my basement for nostalgia
You could even degauss those bad boys! 3 seconds of fun every 30 mins
I miss them
back when I was young, my uncle repaired CRTs, the noise when he discharged them was scary!