Comment by vunderba
2 days ago
Somewhat related but back in my university days, I spent practically all my savings from a summer part-time job to buy a 21" Sony Trinitron CRT. I absolutely loved that thing, but at the end of each year I dreaded having to lug it home and then haul it back to the dorms again.
The elevators often didn’t work and climbing 10 flights of stairs while carrying a 70 lb (31kg) cube was brutal. It’s not often you buy a piece of electronics and get a complimentary workout regimen thrown in.
Some time in the early 1990s I worked with a Macintosh of some variety that had a massively heavy CRT display. It was a real bummer when we were asked to do offsite customer demos, but luckily my back and knees were young enough to carry it upstairs. In retrospect, this is probably why my boss took me to the demos, which was actually quite useful career-wise.
In my own university days, I was once walking into the apartment building when some maintenance men called me over. (This building was part student housing and part normal families). They pointed me to a TV set in an apartment. Apparently a family had abandoned it. It was a big 27” or so set with some weird geometry problems, no visible brand, and menus exclusively in Chinese. Thankfully we had an elevator! I was pretty stoked despite the weird pincushion effects (maybe side effect of being imported from at least 100° of longitude away??) because our apartment’s only TV was a 13” which looked funny in a comically big living room.
Some CRTs had a button to degauss the display, to remove the distortion on the screen. You could also purchase a tool that could be used to degauss a CRT.
I think I’m legitimately traumatized by how heavy CRTs were. The memories of the pain carrying them induced is etched in my body.
I dont feel nostalgic in the least about them.
I am nostalgic about their operational principles, but I was already willing to give these up for the convenience of an LCD panel circa 2003. We had a lot of LAN parties to attend back in those days.
As another person going to LAN parties. I am nostalgic about many things. CRT screens and CRT TVs are not on that list!
SNES/N64 games might look a little better on them, but I take that over the downsides. I can also look longer and more comfortably at modern screens.
On the other hand my current desktop PC with a huge GPU and CPU cooler is not particularly carry friendly either..
The draw of the LCD in the 2000s was the idea that the image you were seeing was a pixel-perfect representation of the creator’s intent.
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