>Was that "common knowledge" in the sci-fi community back then? That future displays would be flat, thin, rectangular? I really don't know, and maybe I'm assum

>Was that "common knowledge" in the sci-fi community back then? That future displays would be flat, thin, rectangular? I really don't know, and maybe I'm assuming too much, but it seems to me that guessing that displays in the future would be flat, thin, and rectangular would be merely logical extrapolation, not any great feat of insight. Displays were already rectangular (basically) for many good reasons: we see this in both movie screens, and televisions. They played around with various aspect ratios, and found that people generally liked wide screens for movies, including extremely wide aspect ratios for "epic" movies like Lawrence of Arabia. Given the way CRTs worked, it would have been easier to have circular displays in those days, but they didn't, except for really, really old oscilloscopes. Long before CRTs, people already had photographs, and here again they were rectangular, despite camera lenses being circular. They didn't even like square photos, despite that being technically easier with circular lenses. So I think any idiot in 1960 could have guessed that displays in the future would remain rectangular. Of course, TVs at the time were not truly rectangular (they had rounded corners), but that was a technical limitation due to how CRTs worked. There was no effort to make movie theater screens look like that. Flatness too seems pretty common-sense. Photographs and movie screens were flat. TVs weren't totally flat, but again it was a technical limitation, and they made them as flat as they reasonably could with the technology available. Predicting thinness doesn't seem to be any feat of brilliance either: again, photographs and movie screens were very thin, obviously. Movie screens relied on rear projection, but that's a technical limitation. TVs weren't thin at all, but again this is a technical limitation, due to how CRTs worked. There were efforts to make CRT TVs thinner; I remember even reading about one attempt to have the CRT mounted sideways and somehow make the electron beam take a 90-degree turn. People didn't really want displays to be so thick. And as we saw from history in the 90s/00s, as soon as decent LCD flat-screen monitors became available, consumers quickly abandoned CRTs.