Alright, it’s time for the moment yall have been waiting for. This is the CRT episode, where I explain where my CRTs have been and what I use them for! Strap in, this is the special interest (though I’m hyperfixated on LFS right now so this may not be as long as you hope.)

This is the first CRT I got, and it’s one of my favorites. Her name’s Sharp, cause I like to name my CRTs after the brand they came from. She’s a CRT tv and I use her to play Xbox360, PS2, and watch movies with a raspberry pi 3b I hook up over composite. She’s from year 2000 exactly, and was well loved by her previous owners before being donated to Te Aro Zero Waste, as you can tell from the worn down power button. It didn’t come with a remote, but I’ve got a Logitech Harmony remote I use for everything anyways.

This here’s Phillips, it’s a CRT monitor that me and a couple other friends bought for a mutual friend of ours for a sleeper build pc project. She’s only here in my room because he doesn’t have the space on his desk for a CRT. She’s a little older than Sharp, coming from around 1998-1999, in the Windows 98 computing era when consumer computers were on the rise. She was made by a big brand because consumer CRTs weren’t as popular at the time, but we’ll see a more generic brand CRT down the line from when CRTs were in high supply and high demand enough for mega-conglomerate corporations to make generic CRTs themselves.

She is however on borrowed time, and I’ve been putting off turning up the transformer because while it would improve the image, it’d be risky and wouldn’t get the poor girl much more life, so I keep her around like a retired racehorse.

And here’s Mercury! One of my favorites, probably 2nd, right behind Sharp. She’s a workstation monitor, which means she wasn’t meant to be owned (ew kinda weird to say that) by the average individual, but instead from by a business for a unix computer which handled almost all the computing that a business would need because of how downright expensive it was to purchase a workstation. You can tell because her manufacturing date on the back of the monitor is 1989, and she’s got a very boxy and plain look, rather thanthe curves and shapes designed to appeal to a customer passing by the local radioshack. Her video cable looks to be either serial or some monochrome predecesor to VGA. She runs on 120v which means I don’t actually know if she turns on, since the wall voltage is 240v and unfortunately I don’t have a stepdown transformer, but I can make assumptions about how she would or did work when she ran.

Yeah, the car Hyundai. They apparently must’ve slapped their name on some other company’s monitors and split the profits. This girl’s probably no older than 23, and was DEFINITELY made after 2000. You can tell the plastic held up much better and didn’t yellow nearly as much, and it’s also pearlier than other white plastics I’ve seen from the late 90s. The shape of the monitor is again very curvy but the buttons aren’t as fun. There’s menu buttons instead of a scrollwheel on the bottom like Phillips had, and the buttons themselves are all very uniform. Post-y2k tech got a lot less quirky and fun, and CRT monitors stopped being a part of a new cool thing but instead just a tool to connect the home computer into, or sometimes a console if you got lucky and knew how to connect it over VGA. Either way, I don’t have as much to say about her, but she works real well as a computer monitor still.

(Dead Inside - Younger Hunger)