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CRTs are peak steam punk technology. Analog, electric, kinda dangerous. Just totally mindblowing that we had these things in our living rooms shooting electric
by sosomoxie 9mo ago
CRTs are peak steam punk technology. Analog, electric, kinda dangerous. Just totally mindblowing that we had these things in our living rooms shooting electric beams everywhere. I doubt it's environmentally friendly at all, but I'd love to see some new CRTs being made.
- fecal_henge 9mo agoExtra dangerous aspect: On really early CRTs they hadn't quite nailed the glass thicknesses. One failure mode was that the neck that held the electron gun would fail. This would propell the gun through the front of the screen, possibly toward the viewer.
- cf100clunk 9mo agoLikewise, a dropped CRT tube was a constant terror for TV manufacturing and repair folks, as it likely would implode and send zillions of razor-sharp fragments airborne.
- thomassmith65 9mo agoMy high school science teacher used to share anecdotes from his days in electrical repair. He said his coworkers would sometimes toss a television capacitor at each other as a prank. Those capacitors retained enough charge to give the person unlucky enough to catch one a considerable jolt.
- freedomben 9mo agoTouching one of those caps was a hell of an experience. It was similar in many ways to a squirrel tap with a wrench in the auto shop (for those who didn't do auto shop, a squirrel tap with a wrench is when somebody flicks your nut sack from behind with a wrench. Properly executed it would leave you doubled over out of breath).
- NL807 9mo agolol I did this with my mates. Get one of those 1 kV ceramics, give it some charge and bob's your uncle, you have one angry capacitor.
- torginus 9mo agoI remember smashing a broken monitor as a kid for fun, hearing about the implosion stuff, and sadly found the back of the glass was stuck to some kind of plastic film that didnt allow the pieces to fly about :(
- ASalazarMX 9mo agoI can't still get over how we used to put them straight in our faces, yet I never knew of someone having an accidental face reshaping ever.
- account42 9mo agoThat doesn't match my experience of deliberately dropping an old CRT monitor off the roof. Implosions are unfortunately not as exciting as explosions.
- cf100clunk 9mo agoThe ''tube'' was indeed extrememly fragile and thus extremely dangerous. I'm talking about only the unguarded ''tube'' itself. Repair and manufacturer technicians had to deal with that on a regular basis. Later, consumer protection laws and other standards came into effect that made TV and monitor superstructures more capable of guarding such a dangerous internal component. Your experience was clearly with those much safer, later types.
- jlokier 9mo agoSome recent HN comments about CRT implosions people have experienced. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355765 "I still have a piece of glass in back of the palm of my right hand. Threw a rock at an old CRT and it exploded, after a couple of hours I noticed a little blood coming out of that part of hand. Many, many years later was doing xray for a broken finger and doctor asked what is that object doing there? I shrugged, doc said, well it looks like it's doing just fine, so might as well stay there. How lucky I am to have both eyes." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354919 "2. Throwing a big big stone to an abandoned next to the trashcan CRT TV while I had it placed normally because it didn’t break when I threw it facing up and the next thing I remember after opening my eyes which I closed from the bang was my friends who were further down the road looking at me as it I were a ghost since big big chunks for the CRT glass flew just right next to me. CRTs were dangerous in many aspects!" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356432 "I'll never forget the feeling of the whoosh when I was working as a furniture mover in the early 2000s and felt the implosion when a cardboard box collapsed and dumped a large CRT TV face-down on the driveway, blowing our hair back. When the boss asked what happened to the TV, I said it fell, and our lead man (who had set it on the box) later thanked me for putting it so diplomatically."
- ASalazarMX 9mo agoI don't know, "Killed by electron gun breakdown" sounds like a rad way to go. You can replace "electron gun" with "particle accelerator" if you want.
- cf100clunk 9mo agoThe shadow mask system for colour CRTs was a huge improvement that thwarted worries about ''beams everywhere'': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask
- hahahahhaah 9mo agoTry antialias with that bad boy
- accounting2026 9mo agoActually, the voltages had to be raised due to the shadow mask, and this rise in voltage meant you were now in x-ray territory, which wasn't the case before. The infamous problems with TV's emitting x-rays and associate recalls were the early color TV's. And it wasn't so much from the tube, but from the shunt regulators etc. in the power supply that were themselves vacuum tubes. If you removed the protection cans around those you would be exposed to strong radiation. Most of that went away when the TV's were transistorized so the high-voltage circuits didn't involve vacuum tubes.
- cf100clunk 9mo agoMost of those old TVs were not Faraday Caged either, nor were they grounded to earth, so all that radiation and energy was one hardware failure away from seriously unfunny events. Their chassis grounding always gave a tingle to the touch.
- joe_the_user 9mo agoAlso, I believe precursors to CRT existed in the 19th century. What was unique with television was the creation of a full CRT system that allowed moving picture consumption to be a mass phenomena.
- pinnochio 9mo agoWe're getting awfully close to recreating CRT qualities with modern display panels. A curved 4:3 1000Hz OLED panel behind glass, and an integrated RetroTink 4K with G-Sync Pulsar support would do it. Then add in a simulated degauss effect and electrical whine and buzzing sounds for fun.
- soperj 9mo agostill can't play duck hunt on it though.
- gzalo 9mo agoYes you can, see https://neslcdmod.com/ https://neslcdmod.com/ It basically mods the rom to allow for a bit more latency when checking the hit targets
- charcircuit 9mo ago>1000 Hz This sounds like a brute force solution over just having the display controller read the image as it is being sent and emulating the phosphors.
- pezezin 9mo agoWhy curved? We didn't like the CRT curvature back then and manufacturers struggled to make them as flat as possible, finally reaching "virtually flat" screens towards the end of the CRT era. I have one right here on my desk, a Sony Multiscan E200.
- itisit 9mo agoAnd perhaps peak atompunk too when used as RAM. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube
- BizarroLand 9mo agoDamn, what I wouldn't give to be able to look at my computer and see the bits bobbing in its onboard ram
- itisit 9mo agoLike the MegaProcessor? [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNa9bQRPMB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNa9bQRPMB8
- BizarroLand 9mo agoYes but for my 9950x, lol
- brcmthrowaway 9mo agoThe 1940-1990 era of technology can't be beat. Add hard drives and tape to the mix. What happened to electromechanical design? I doubt it would be taught anymore. Everything is solid state
- Xirdus 9mo agoSolid state is the superior technology for almost everything. No moving parts means more reliable, quieter, and very likely more energy efficient since no mass has to move.
- jasonfarnon 9mo agoDo modern hdd's last as long as the old platter ones? For me, when the SSDs fail it's frustrating because I can't open it up and do anything about it--it's a complete loss. So I tend to have a low opinion of their reliability (same issue I have with old versus new electronic-everything cars). I don't know the actual lifetimes. Surely USB sticks are universally recognized as pretty crappy. I can leave those in the same location plugged in and they'll randomly die after a couple of years.
- djkoolaide 9mo agoI've had two SSDs "die" over the years, both of them went read-only, but I was able to recover all data. SSD failure modes are weird.
- Xirdus 9mo agoI feel like I'm the only person in the world who never had an issue with USB flash drives. Or HDDs for that matter. Or SSDs. I don't think I've ever had any storage die on me except optical disks. Internet says both HDDs and SSDs have similar average lifespans, but with HDDs it's usually a mechanical failure so yes, you can often DIY it back to life if you have the right parts. With SSDs it's almost always the memory cells themselves wearing out. On the flip side, data recovery is usually much easier since SSD will usually keep working in read-only mode for a while, whereas a faulty HDD won't work at all.
- kazinator 9mo agoWith CRTs, the environmental problem is the heavy metals: tons of lead in the glass screen, plus cadmium and whatnot. Supposedly there can be many pounds of lead in a large CRT.
- ortusdux 9mo agoOne summer odd-job included an afternoon of throwing a few dozen CRTs off a 3rd floor balcony into a rolloff dumpster. I'da done it for free.
- ihaveajob 9mo agoPeople pay for that these days in smash rooms.
- hahahahhaah 9mo agoRock and roll!
- kleiba 9mo agoWhat do you mean "had"? I just turned mine off a minute ago. I am yet to make the transition to flat screen TVs but in the mean time, at least no-one's tracking my consumer habits.
- femto 9mo agoThis thread makes me realise that the old Telequipment D61 Cathode Ray Oscilloscope I have is worth hanging on to. It's basically a CRT with signal conditioning on its inputs, including a "Z mod" input, making it easy to do cool stuff with it.
- retrac 9mo agoThere's a synchronous and instantaneous nature you don't find in modern designs. The image is not stored at any point. The receiver and the transmitter are part of the same electric circuit in a certain sense. It's a virtual circuit but the entire thing - transmitter and receiving unit alike - are oscillating in unison driven by a single clock. The image is never entirely realized as a complete thing, either. While slow phosphor tubes do display a static image, most CRT systems used extremely fast phosphors; they release the majority of the light within a millisecond of the beam hitting them. If you take a really fast exposure of a CRT display (say 1/100,000th of a second) you don't see the whole image on the photograph - only the most recently few drawn lines glow. The image as a whole never exists at the same time. It exists only in the persistence of vision.
- torginus 9mo agoYeah it super weird that while we struggle with latency in the digital world, storing anything for any amount of time is an almost impossible challenge in the analog world.
- iberator 9mo agoYou should check out: - Core memory - Drum memory - Bubble memory - Mercury delay line memory - Magnetic type memory :P And probably many more. Remember that computers don't even need to be digital!
- abyesilyurt 9mo ago> computers don't even need to be digital! or electric.
- accounting2026 9mo agoThis stores a whole scanline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsk4WWtRx6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsk4WWtRx6M. This or something similar was in almost any decent color TV except for the oldest.
- accounting2026 9mo ago
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- lebuffon 9mo agoI was on a course at Sony in San Mateo in the 1980s and they had a 36" prototype television in the corner. We all asked for it to be turned on. We were told by the instructor that he was not allowed to turn it on because the 40,000V anode voltage generated too many X-rays at the front of the picture tube. :-))))
- zapataband2 9mo ago[dead]
- grishka 9mo agoThat and modern digital TV is just incredibly boring from the technical standpoint. Because everything is a computer these days, it's just some MPEG-2 video. The only thing impressive about it is that they managed to squeeze multiple channels worth of video streams into the bandwidth of one analog channel.
- mrandish 9mo agoIt's worth deep diving into how analog composite broadcast television works, because you quickly realize just how insanely ambitious it was for 1930s engineers to have not only conceived, but perfected and shipped at consumer scale using only 1930s technologies. Being old enough to have learned video engineering at the end of the analog days, it's kind of fun helping young engineers today wrap their brains around completely alien concepts, like "the image is never pixels" then "it's never digital" and "never quantized." Those who've been raised in a digital world learn to understand things from a fundamentally digital frame of reference. Even analog signals are often reasoned about as if their quantized form was their "true nature". Interestingly, I suspect the converse would be equally true trying to explain digital television to a 1930s video engineer. They'd probably struggle similarly, always mentally remapping digital images to their "true" analog nature. The fundamental nature of their world was analog. Nothing was quantized. Even the idea "quanta" might be at the root of physics was newfangled, suspect and, even if true, of no practical use in engineering systems.
- account42 9mo agoIt's interesting how early digital video systems were influenced by the analog aspects. DVDs were very much still defined by NTSC/PAL even though the data is fully digital.
- mrandish 9mo agoIndeed and even today's HDTV specification has elements based on echoes reverberating all the way from decisions made in the 1930s when specifying B&W TV. The composite and component sampling rates (14.32 MHz and 13.5 MHz) are both based on being 4x a specific existing color carrier sampling rate from analog television. And those two frequencies directly dictated all the odd-seeming horizontal pixel resolutions we find in pre-HD digital video (352, 704, 360, 720 and 768) and even the original PC display resolutions (CGA, VGA, XGA, etc). For example, the 720 horizontal pixels of DVD and digital satellite broadcasts was tied to the digital component video standard sampling the active picture area of an analog video scanline at 13.5 Mhz to capture the 1440 clock transitions in that waveform. Similarly, 768 (another common horizontal resolution in pre-HD video) is tied to the composite video standard sampling at 14.32 MHz to capture 1536 clock transitions. The history of how these standards were derived is fascinating (https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_304-rec601_wood.pdf https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_304-rec601_wood.pdf) VGA's horizontal resolution of 640 is simply from adjusting analog video's rectangular aspect ratio to be square (720 * 0.909 = 640). It's kind of fascinating all these modern digital resolutions can be traced back to decisions made in the 1930s based on which affordable analog components were available, which competing commercial interests prevailed (RCA vs Philco) and the political sensitivities present at the time.
- accidentallfact 9mo ago'Steampunk' means no electricity. You need to come up with another term. Analogpunk, maybe?
- WorldMaker 9mo ago"Dieselpunk" is sometimes considered the next door neighbor term for WW1 through early 1950's retrofuturism with electricity and radios/very early televisions. Sometimes people use "Steampunk" for shorthand for both because there are some overlaps in either direction, especially if you are trying for "just" pre-WWI retrofuture. Though I think the above poster was maybe especially trying to highlight the sort of pre-WWI overlap with Steampunk with more electricity but not yet as many cars and "diesel". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieselpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieselpunk
- accidentallfact 9mo agoI don't know. Steam and electricity seem more like a coincidence that they were developed at the same time, so worlds without one seem natural. Another possibility might be no semiconductors. No nuclear also feels plausible, but it's just not interesting. Anything else requires a massive stretch to explain why technology got stuck in such a state.
- WorldMaker 9mo agoPerhaps, if you are worried about realism from the perspective of modern technology. But a lot of the concept of retrofuturism is considering the possible futures from the perspectives of the past. You don't necessarily need realism for why you would consider an exercise like that. Steampunk is "rootable" in the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and others. We have scifi visions from Victorian and Edwardian lenses. It wasn't needed at the time to explain how you steam power a submarine or a rocket ship, it was just extrapolating "if this goes on" of quick advances in steam power and expecting them to eventually get there. Similar with a lot of Diselpunk. The 1930s through the 1950s are often referred to as the Golden Age of scifi. There's so much science fiction written in the real world with a zeal for possible futures that never happened. We don't necessarily need a "massive stretch" to explain why technology took a different path or "got stuck" at a particular point. We've plenty of ideas of the exuberance of that era just in the books that they wrote and published themselves. (Not that we are lacking in literary means to create excuses for the "realism" of retrofuture, either, when we care to. For one obvious instance, the Fallout franchise's nuclear warfare is central to its dieselpunk setting and an obvious reason for technology to get "stuck". For one less obvious reason, I like "For All Mankind" and its "Apollopunk" setting using the excuse of Russia beating the United States to first boots on the Moon and the butterfly impacts that could have had.)
- account42 9mo agoWhile not entirely thematically unrelated, being electric puts it distinctly outside of steampunk and even dieselpunk. I don't think anyone would call The Matrix steampunk but CRTs are at the center of its aesthetic. Cassette Futurism is the correct term I believe though it also overlaps with some sub-genres of cyberpunk.
- accounting2026 9mo agoYes - and x-rays too! Both from the main TV tube itself (though often shielded) but historically the main problem was actually the vacuum rectifiers used to generate the high voltages required. Those vacuum tubes essentially became x-ray bulbs and had to be shielded. This problem appeared as the first color TV's appeared in the late 60s. Color required higher voltages for the same brightness, due to the introduction of a mask that absorbed a lot of the energy. As a famous example, certain GE TV's would emit a strong beam of x-rays, but it was downwards so it would mostly expose someone beneath the TV. Reportedly a few models could emit 50,000 mR/hr at 9 inches distance https://www.nytimes.com/1967/07/22/archives/owners-of-9000-color-tv-sets-warned-of-rays-us-asserts-unlocated-ge.html https://www.nytimes.com/1967/07/22/archives/owners-of-9000-c... which is actually quite a lot (enough for radiation sickness after a few hours). All were recalled of course!
- gman83 9mo agoThis is a cool little project you might be interested in - https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass