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Raison d'État

Raison d'État

@npub1mts2l7rsvgpqxdc8sk39e50fpntw0p7eamq8pp3kek5h6k7qemzq83ueyt@momostr.pink remote
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The first CRT display was made in 1899, in a small workshop. Monochrome, of course.

Required technologies: glass casting, wire forming, vacuum-pumps, sheet metal fabrication.

Required materials: glass, copper wire, a fluorescent pigment, a conductive coating, and any alkali salt with thermoionic properties.

If anything "happens" to global trade flows from China's gigafactories, artisanal-built CRTs gonna come back like the 1990s never ended.

RE: https://pkteerium.xyz/objects/7a8ce731-c951-4a26-9b04-5d9fe096a158
djsumdog

djsumdog

@djsumdog@djsumdog.com remote
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I dunno. What was the resolution of that first CRT? Did it just display lines? I've played on one of the original Asteroids units at a museum. CRT with analog circuits and those beautiful, crisp, sharp and haunting white lines .. and that came after decades of work; well past the radio era.

Artisanal CRTs would be a huge leapback for last least a decade.
Replying to @djsumdog@djsumdog.com
Raison d'État

Raison d'État

@npub1mts2l7rsvgpqxdc8sk39e50fpntw0p7eamq8pp3kek5h6k7qemzq83ueyt@momostr.pink remote
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People think of Standard Definition TVs when they think of CRTs, but there's actually no necessary connection.

Those beautiful, crisp, sharp, white lines in Asteroids are much older than television - the very first CRTs were vector-based not raster-based, and technically-capable of amazingly fine resolution. Oscilloscopes FTW!

But there were no computers around to make use of their full potential.

Any modern computer with stereo audio output can drive a vector CRT, with resolution hundreds of times sharper than a modern OLED or LCD screen. The limitations are not resolution per se, more around the rate of change your op-amps are capable of, and leakage of storage capacitors.

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Replying to @npub1mts2l7rsvgpqxdc8sk39e50fpntw0p7eamq8pp3kek5h6k7qemzq83ueyt@momostr.pink
djsumdog

djsumdog

@djsumdog@djsumdog.com remote
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oh I had access to a CRT oscilloscope in our embedded systems lab in grad school. We had some LCD ones too, but the analogue ones just felt so much better. You could adjust your sample rate just right and get a perfect straight line from the aliasing from a sine wave generator.

I think TechMoan did a video on people in the demo-scene who get them to make all kinda of insane pictures from frequency input.
Replying to @djsumdog@djsumdog.com