4 ms·

Many culturally significant products and practices go down this path. I believe washi particularly shoji will eventually settle into the category of "isn't prod

Many culturally significant products and practices go down this path. I believe washi particularly shoji will eventually settle into the category of "isn't produced on an industrial scale but never stops being made" with other products such as chainmail, non-electric typewriters, swords, powder horns, quill pens, parchment, monocle, coonskin caps, cathode ray tubes, hand drills, etc.

rwmj 7y ago
Is anyone making CRTs? As I understand it, original broadcast CRT monitors (so-called PVMs and BVMs) are becoming rare and expensive. They are sought after by retro gamers in particular.
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  That's exactly when there appears a market for building CRT's to order and to size, when they become economically viable again. It's like when vinyl pressing and/or cassette tape recording machines were pulled out from storage again. It's not so much a matter of the art being lost (well, for now), more of things not being economically viable. There's also a guy somewhere who's stocked up on diskettes and drives, there's still a large amount of devices that rely on them (e.g. in manufacturing, think stuff like weaving patterns and the like)
  - jpindar 7y ago
    Did floppy drives all have the same interface? I know there were different data formats but were the physical drives all compatible?
    - dan_hawkins 7y ago
      Pretty much yes - on the lowest level you've just got signals a stepper motor and analog signal from head(s).
- jdietrich 7y ago
  Thomas Electronics still make CRTs, mainly for the defence and aerospace industry. https://www.thomaselectronics.com/ https://www.thomaselectronics.com/
  - Phillipharryt 7y ago
    Though of those linked it appears 2 of the 3 applications are essentially refurbishing or replacing screens in existing systems. The only application that seems "new" is the CRT HuD which I don't believe is going anywhere soon. Once the displays in older machines are replaced with LCDs (as in new machines won't include them) I assume the only application will be that HuD.
- speeder 7y ago
  Sadly, no. I use CRT on my main computer, in my country all flat panels I seen so far are too expensive OR useless for my purposes. 1. CRT can use arbitrary resolutions, I love that, not only for retro gaming, but some modern games can reach "ultra" settings when lowering resolution a little, on a "mid-range" GPU (I own a Radeon 380X, sadly the last GPU to have analog video, I dunno what I will do when purchasing my next one) 2. My CRT contrast never bothered me, differently from the flat panels I owned, for example trying to play "superhot" and then "dark souls" same day required lots and lots of fiddling with flat panels, the settings that let me see anything at all on dark souls, made the screen flat white on superhot, fixing the settings for superhot made the screen flat black on dark souls... CRT I never felt the need to readjust contrast and brigthness after I found the setting I wanted. 3. Input lag... for most games this is not obvious, specially since lots of recent games have input lag anyway (for example I noticed a couple games check the controller status in a certain order that make all input always 1 frame late, sometimes 2 frames late if there is vsync and whatnot in the mix) but for example playing "Necrodancer" on CRT is much, MUCH easier for me. 4. This one is more theoretical, since the CRTs I own are cheap, but for a long time some CRTs could reach crazy high refresh rates. 5. "HDR", well, to be honest I never seen this either in person, but I know that some manufacturers did made some cool CRTs that supported HDR, most notably for SGI workstations that could create images with some ridiculous amounts of bits per pixel. 6. Retro gaming without expensive hardware: many, MANY games relied on CRT pixel "bleed" and fuzzyness of analog systems to create special effects, a notorious one is the waterfalls in sonic, on a system that has the intended hardware instead of seeing alternating columns of pixels, you would see a transparent waterfall, there are lots of emulators with plugins to simulate those, but to make the art work REALLY right on a modern screen you need a 4k screen, expensive powerful GPU and whatnot... as weird it sounds... it is cheaper to buy an actual CRT and even an actual old console to play some games.
  - mrob 7y ago
    >MANY games relied on CRT pixel "bleed" and fuzzyness of analog systems to create special effects, a notorious one is the waterfalls in sonic But handheld systems with sharp pixels used the same art techniques, and many pieces of official artwork showed game art drawn with sharp pixels (think early NES game cover art). The Sonic waterfalls even use distinct vertical lines to represent falling water, instead of a checkerboard dither pattern, which would be the natural choice if you assumed it would be blurred. Arcade games used the same art techniques too, and they used high quality monitors and RGB connections, so pixels were clearly visible.
jefftk 7y ago
> hand drills These are still mass produced: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/drilling-machine-manual-hand-drill-hand_60494541830.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/drilling-machine-manu...
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Parchment, well vellum, is interesting. There's still a company or two producing it in the UK as all UK law is published on vellum, as it's been shown to last thousands of years. When they've looked at switching to archival paper, it's not been much cheaper, and only that it should last. Parchment also has a fair amount of natural fire resistance.

rwmj 7y ago

Is anyone making CRTs? As I understand it, original broadcast CRT monitors (so-called PVMs and BVMs) are becoming rare and expensive. They are sought after by retro gamers in particular.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago
That's exactly when there appears a market for building CRT's to order and to size, when they become economically viable again. It's like when vinyl pressing and/or cassette tape recording machines were pulled out from storage again. It's not so much a matter of the art being lost (well, for now), more of things not being economically viable. There's also a guy somewhere who's stocked up on diskettes and drives, there's still a large amount of devices that rely on them (e.g. in manufacturing, think stuff like weaving patterns and the like)
- jpindar 7y ago
  Did floppy drives all have the same interface? I know there were different data formats but were the physical drives all compatible?
  - dan_hawkins 7y ago
    Pretty much yes - on the lowest level you've just got signals a stepper motor and analog signal from head(s).
jdietrich 7y ago
Thomas Electronics still make CRTs, mainly for the defence and aerospace industry. https://www.thomaselectronics.com/ https://www.thomaselectronics.com/
- Phillipharryt 7y ago
  Though of those linked it appears 2 of the 3 applications are essentially refurbishing or replacing screens in existing systems. The only application that seems "new" is the CRT HuD which I don't believe is going anywhere soon. Once the displays in older machines are replaced with LCDs (as in new machines won't include them) I assume the only application will be that HuD.
speeder 7y ago
Sadly, no. I use CRT on my main computer, in my country all flat panels I seen so far are too expensive OR useless for my purposes. 1. CRT can use arbitrary resolutions, I love that, not only for retro gaming, but some modern games can reach "ultra" settings when lowering resolution a little, on a "mid-range" GPU (I own a Radeon 380X, sadly the last GPU to have analog video, I dunno what I will do when purchasing my next one) 2. My CRT contrast never bothered me, differently from the flat panels I owned, for example trying to play "superhot" and then "dark souls" same day required lots and lots of fiddling with flat panels, the settings that let me see anything at all on dark souls, made the screen flat white on superhot, fixing the settings for superhot made the screen flat black on dark souls... CRT I never felt the need to readjust contrast and brigthness after I found the setting I wanted. 3. Input lag... for most games this is not obvious, specially since lots of recent games have input lag anyway (for example I noticed a couple games check the controller status in a certain order that make all input always 1 frame late, sometimes 2 frames late if there is vsync and whatnot in the mix) but for example playing "Necrodancer" on CRT is much, MUCH easier for me. 4. This one is more theoretical, since the CRTs I own are cheap, but for a long time some CRTs could reach crazy high refresh rates. 5. "HDR", well, to be honest I never seen this either in person, but I know that some manufacturers did made some cool CRTs that supported HDR, most notably for SGI workstations that could create images with some ridiculous amounts of bits per pixel. 6. Retro gaming without expensive hardware: many, MANY games relied on CRT pixel "bleed" and fuzzyness of analog systems to create special effects, a notorious one is the waterfalls in sonic, on a system that has the intended hardware instead of seeing alternating columns of pixels, you would see a transparent waterfall, there are lots of emulators with plugins to simulate those, but to make the art work REALLY right on a modern screen you need a 4k screen, expensive powerful GPU and whatnot... as weird it sounds... it is cheaper to buy an actual CRT and even an actual old console to play some games.
- mrob 7y ago
  >MANY games relied on CRT pixel "bleed" and fuzzyness of analog systems to create special effects, a notorious one is the waterfalls in sonic But handheld systems with sharp pixels used the same art techniques, and many pieces of official artwork showed game art drawn with sharp pixels (think early NES game cover art). The Sonic waterfalls even use distinct vertical lines to represent falling water, instead of a checkerboard dither pattern, which would be the natural choice if you assumed it would be blurred. Arcade games used the same art techniques too, and they used high quality monitors and RGB connections, so pixels were clearly visible.

jefftk 7y ago

> hand drills These are still mass produced: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/drilling-machine-manual-hand-drill-hand_60494541830.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/drilling-machine-manu...

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Parchment, well vellum, is interesting. There's still a company or two producing it in the UK as all UK law is published on vellum, as it's been shown to last thousands of years. When they've looked at switching to archival paper, it's not been much cheaper, and only that it should last. Parchment also has a fair amount of natural fire resistance.