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Who Still Uses Old Monitors?
skurrier asks: "Reading the comments for a totally unrelated article, an almost off topic post caught my eye: Someone said that they still had a Sun branded Sony GDM class monitor from way back, and (of course) it rocked then and still rocks. (Sorry, can't find the article, yet alone the comment) As I looked across my desk to that similar Sun branded Sony behemoth plugged into my PC I asked myself: How many people still use ancient monitors? And more importantly, what is the oldest monitor you still use regularly?"
Unforunatly i still have a Monochome monitor on my test bench. You never know when you need to run XGA Graphics
A nice 20" Trinitron from 1996. Not REALLY old, but better than most monitors from 1996. Still a decent match for any current curved-screen monitor, actually. Well, in everything but refresh rate.
It gets me 1600x1200x32, so I'm happy.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
Not exactly a monitor, but I've got a IBM 3151 terminal hooked up to the serial port on my machine at home. Makes a nice dedicated mp3 player. Bought it at Goodwill for $3 (including keyboard).
stuff
I had a huge old monitor until recently, when I moved into a third-floor flat in an old Victorian house.
I gave the old monitor away to the first person who wanted it, and now have a flat panel display - a lot easier to carry up all those stairs.
Were it not for the move, I would have continued to use the old monitor until it died.
I use throw-away VGA monitors in MAME hardware projects.
Young whippersnappers! I'm still using a dot-matrix printer for a display, and I like it that way!
I have and use a 14" TVM monitor from 1992. Does 640x480@70, 800x600@56, and 1024x768@43.5 *interlaced*. Attached to a 486 DX/50 w/ 8mb of ram running Gentoo linux. I need all the compiler flags I can get ! This is not a joke.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
I really think the subject says it all.
Seriously though, it's real. It has a vga connector and can do 640x480 in 4 glorious shades of gray.
14" VGA monitor that takes 20mins to warm up, though this time is decreased with vertical encouragement. Used all the time to:
...but the website it serves totally hides this.
:p
- check freenode via bitchx
- config router
I'd love to show a pic, especially alongside the router with no case as it's laughable
In fact all my monitors are old - 15" at best and CRT
But... they don't lose pixels and are faily bomb proof!
A blog I run for the wealth
When I was playing with video camera's and a Panasonic 'digital' video editing board, I used the Apple as a monitor of my incoming video signal.
Ten years later the thing still works, but not used anymore.
I watch TV on my 1987 Commodore Amiga 13" monitor. Hey, it works!
four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
This superb 21" CRT monitor is "only" 6 years old... But with an average of 10-hours/day of use, the display is still as bright & crisp today as it was back on the first day I got it. These were surely the best 2500 German Marks I have ever spent on computer hardware. I cannot praise Iiyma enough for the monitors they are manufacturing !!@
I also have an ancient 19" Sun branded Sony Trinitron monitor, still just as usable as it was when it was new (over a decade ago).
It's hooked up to a SPARCstation 10 from the same era, though it's been hopped up a bit (dual 166MHz HyperSPARC CPUs).
The only drawback to this monitor is an advantage in the winter... it produces more heat than any monitor I've ever seen.
I don't even need to run my heater most nights, but then I live in South Florida (yes, it does get down into the 40s down here).
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
Cheers,
Ian
I have also written a little WinAmp pluggin to demo the effect, since you can't download my old monitor. It is here. Go into the Preferences panel, select Plug-ins, then Visualization. Select the vis_text.dll pluggin and then in the drop-down box at the bottom select Strange.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I have a vt 420 hooked up with a serial switch to be the console on 4 servers. I call it a poor man's KVM. (though I guess that's not technically correct since the M stands for mouse) The cables are just plain serial, the switch was about 20 bucks, and the vt 420 was free. It's a pain to find MMJ cables, so I usually make them myself.
The good 'ole Hercules orange on black 12" is all a 486 LRP router really needs...
Yep, not even the Color-I Plus. No power LED for us!
My dad's had to repair it a couple times, but we still run it for video gaming. Man, that thing's had more stuff connected to it....
* I believe the Ohio Scientific with a huge 8K RAM used a different monitor, and the C= 64 was the original reason this one was purchased. But I'm too young to remember anything before the Amigas very well.
** To run the Amigas, my dad built a custom cable and added a plug to the monitor to hook the Amiga RGB output up more-or-less directly to the electron guns.
__CmdrTHAC0__
In Soviet Russia, Spanish Inquisition doesn't expect YOU!!
I surely am going to die from excessive X-Ray exposure.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
Now I only use it for the C64 but it's still working. The shielding is awful though - I have a 17" SVGA monitor right next to it, and as long as the 1702 is on, the screen on the other is all wavy.
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
Sun and SGI both resold top notch Sony GDM monitors. Best of all, they're dirt cheap now. Watch out for incompatible 13W3 connectors. Still you can get a 21" multi-sync (1600x1200x85Hz) for under $200. Expect to pay $75 - $100 shipping - those puppies are heavy. SGI also had a 24" 16:9 that did 1920x1080x85Hz for HDTV production and CAD. At 90 lbs, it was definitely a "two-person" lift.
My original Commodor 64 Monitor is still in great shape and runs in a bank of monitors my buddy has in his basement. They've got four working Commodore 64 monitors and a 27 inch tv with several game systems all hooked up. People will crowd in, bring over their XBoxes (XBoxen?) or Gamecubes and have ourselves a good old fashioned geek out. That same Commodore 64 monitor served as my tv in my residence room in University, was the screen I watched my first porno movie on in grade school and most important - was the screen that ran all those amazing Commodore 64 games. Space Taxi, Jump Man and Ghostbusters are still some of my all time favourites. The thing is coming up on 20 years old and still works like a charm.
Also, if you're in Canada - check out the occasional government surplus auctions. They're always selling these amazing old monitors for practically nothing. A couple of years back I picked up this behemoth 23 inch monitor that must have been a decade old. Still worked and was great for gaming. $45 bucks. When the brightness started to go, I managed to find a 21" Dell branded Trinitron knock off (or some kind of flatscreen) for $100.
Also, a buddy of mine ripped the monitor out of an old broken Mac Classic - one of those little black and white 9 inch monitors and incorporated it into some art project he did. It and 7 other monitors ripped free of their housings are arranged in some weird gothic metal looking statue thing. It's outfitted with cheap motion sensors and low quality video cameras and will display all kinds of weirdness based on what's going on around it.
My main monitor is a ten year old Sony 19in 300sf, I try to recalibrate it once in a while and it doesn't need it, no color drift or fade after years and years of use.
I still routinely use an ancient Apple (Sony trinitron) 13in color monitor, yeah the ancient one that only does 640x480. I plug it into my OS X headless server whenever I need to do maintenance directly instead of by remote. That monitor has to be 15 years old minimum.
Windex and a large category of other cleaning solutions for monitors are counterindicated.
First, they may attack the anti-glare coatings of the screen, which is what happened to one of my monitors before I acquired it.
Second, they may set your monitor on fire if they produce any flamable vapors. This happened more than once in the eighties.
Third, a damp cloth does a perfectly good job of cleaning monitors, with perhaps a little bit of dish soap.
Gentoo Sucks
Just the other day I had a few friends over for a small starcraft LAN party. Turns out we were one monitor short, so we rigged my friends box up to an old 1983? 1985? Mitsubishi TV.
The resolution was a little (ok, a lot) crappy, but it worked. And it was damned cool at the time, too.
find / -name "*.sig" | xargs rm
Ugh... I just had flashbacks to my typing class in the late 80s (fully manual typewriters).
Bolding text was a real fun task... A{backspace}AL {backspace}LP {backspace}PO {backspace}O {space}.
Or counting out letters so that you could center text on the page properly.
My first printer was an electronic typewriter hooked up to a serial port on the computer. Boy did that prove difficult (spent a day at the local repair shop getting them to make it work). Not to mention trying to print a 20 page term-paper and making sure the form-fed paper stayed aligned (no sprockets).
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?