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A friend in college was given a free CRT airport monitor. It was something close to 40" and weighed at least 500lbs. It took 4 of us to very angrily move it to his upstairs room.
I once had a 25" TV kind of… “un-skin” itself. It slid off of a hand-truck by accident, and while falling a whole five inches to the ground, the sheer weight and mass of the tube pushed itself through the brittle plastic housing of the set. What was left was a pile of plastic shrapnel and circuit boards, with a fully intact tube sitting atop it. It was only ten years old at the time, and I think it was either bad plastic or it lived its life in a sunny spot, letting UV destroy the material.
TV tube glass is actually surprisingly robust along the front and sides, despite containing a vacuum. It’s the neck that you have to be careful with. One false move and it’ll snap, destroying the whole thing.
Every other time you dropped it but nothing ever happened to it, and it’s still in your parents basement collecting dust.
I had a friend in the '90s who moved into a duplex and found that the previous tenant had cut into the separating wall and tied a splitter into the neighbor’s cable line. So he had free cable until the day the cable went out and he called the cable company to complain.
Going to LAN party with cathodic tube monitors T.T
I got PTSD from dragging one of those fuckers up three flights of stairs, back in the 80s. Had a good job, single, decided to splurge on a massive 27 incher, or whatever it was back then, without ever considering the logistics of such an operation. A lot of Yosemite Sam-style muttering that day, let me tell you.
I got all you losers beat:
- Console with RCA connectors or ant>RCA adapter
- Plugged into the video-in adapter on my camcorder
- Hooked up via firewire 400 to my sister’s 2000 iMac
- Running in cracked video editing software
- Didn’t know how to resize the windows, so my game only took up about 20% of the CRT
I bet y’all can’t even handle how jealous you are of my sweaty ass being cooked by humming electronics while failing levels over and over due to unnecessary latency.
I used this setup when I was grounded, which was frequent. Which also meant that I had to be really quick-like in setup and teardown and always had to pack everything back up when I was finished/heard the garage door open, to hide the evidence. My dad would check the temperatures of all the TVs around the house to make sure I wasn’t using them, but I was allowed to use the computer for homework and video editing.
In 2000, at around the point when most well off people were transitioning to flat panel TVs, I inherited a large 32" CRT from a friend of mine. They were upgrading and wanted to get rid of their old CRT.
I said I’d take it and use it for my treadmill so I could watch TV while I walked.
The thing weighed 100lbs!!! I had to build a reinforced stand to lift it up in the air and I nearly killed myself hoisting it up and having it nearly fall on me multiple times! And the thing took up so much room … I think it occupied almost the same amount of floor space as the treadmill.
The dangerous thing about these things is that they were big and lopsided … it’s like lifting a huge kettle ball but all the weight of the ball is only on one side and the rest of it is empty air. It was really easy to just drop the thing because you lost balance with it. Or even worse, throw your back and some muscle because you were trying to save it from falling over while you held it.
I had a 32" and it had a flat screen meaning the glass wasn’t curved but it wasn’t thin. It was also higher res than 480p, it was a transitional model before flat screens rolled out. It weighed 160lbs! I was moving it carrying it by myself and had to rest it on my thighs for a few seconds. They were bruised for a week.
Flat CRTs were probably even heavier than curved ones because the glass has to be thicker to hold vacuum with a less structurally-efficient shape.
My dad an en excellent 24" Panasonic he got a few years agter he died. We moved it across the Midwest 6 times from 95-2010 until we finally replaced it with a 42" led after moving to Kansas City. So my brother and i got to take it downstairs and play Halo Reach and Black Ops on it. They might have been heavy and a bitch to move, but they were awesome TV’s that could take a beating.
Until one day, you turn it on, and without warning, you are presented with half a screen, or a single white line across the middle. Sound is optional.
I used to put all my change in a big jar, which was reserved for my next TV. When my current one crapped out, I’d listen to music while I rolled up my change, and go buy a new one somewhere. If I happened to be flush, maybe I’d add a bit more and get the next size up.
That was the thing with these old heavy CRTs … they could take a beating … they could also give a beating.
have you really used a CRT if you haven’t learned how to smack it back into working?
lol … I had a few family members with that mentality … you gave it a few gentle smacks to try to coax it to work and often it did work … but when it didn’t, they’d hit it harder, then harder, then harder until the screen just turned into horizontal or diagonal static which usually meant the thing was destroyed.
Sounds like they didn’t know how to hit it right to me
Good ol percussion maintenance
but did you ever play 4-player Mariokart64 on a…
GoldenEye. No screen-lookin.
We called it screen watching. Cheap shit. Yeah I did it too.
We used a splitter and covered half of each of the screens with paper.
Because I was so naive at the time I couldn’t figure out why my brother’s friend KD always knew where I was…
No Oddjob.
i’ve got an old 7 inch b/w portable crt. I think it was a “kitchen counter” unit? slightly younger than your panasonic
I played 4 player Conker’s Bad Fur day on a TV slightly bigger.
It was the best multiplayer
I still have a TV exactly like this I keep around for my NES. My N64 is always connected to my main TV.
“You mean I get this 21” monitor for free if I can carry it down five flights to my car?! Thanks mister!” - Me as a child
hears loud banging and glass shattering on the stairwell, as a 70 pound monitor tumbles and rolls down the stairs while 20 year old dust off the magnetron fills the air …its junk now.
I’m a 90s kid and I still am moving my CRT around like this
If you don’t yet own a sony trinitron, buy one while you can still afford it. These things are skyrocketing in value rn
I saved a perfectly good 32" Trinitron from being dumped as e-waste a couple years ago, it was only missing the remote. Local church occasionally does an e-waste recycling day, and when I saw that beast about to be loaded I asked how much for me to take it off their hands, so a $10 donation to the church later I had a 100lb tv in my trunk.
They’re already hundreds and sell quickly on my local second hand markets =( I’ve given up
I found one of these last year for $150 cad. https://crtdatabase.com/crts/sony/sony-kv-24fs100
Don’t give up!!
I have a piece of shit Sony TV. I rolled it up the stairs when I was 16, it has only been removed from it’s wheeled table a week ago I am now 26. These so so bitches weigh a lot.
I had one of the first hdtvs. Well it was HDTV Ready I think it was marketed as. It was essentially just a 36in 800x600 crt monitor. Had to pair it with a special directv receiver. I think it was a RCA MM36110 and the damn thing weighed nearly 200 lbs. Needless to say I’m pretty sure I left in the house I sold because it was just too damn heavy. I have a 55inch TV that feels like a toy compared to it.
https://dn721608.ca.archive.org/0/items/manualsbase-id-145505/145505.pdf
My last two CRTs were 32 and 75 inches (that one was a beast and took up the whole room) I love lcds now
Yep that and massive bulky air conditioners the bane of my young back.
I just bought RGB to VGA adapters for my consoles instead (and S-Video to VGA for the earlier 90s consoles that didn’t support RGB/VGA without a mod chip).
It was a lot easier to haul a 19" CRT monitor over a 25" CRT TV, due to not only being smaller, but having fewer circuitry as well since you don’t need a tuner. The image was a lot sharper too for obvious reasons.
<ADHD-induced tangent>
Speaking of which, some of my best memories as young adult involved bringing my XBOX over to my cousins’ house, borrowing my aunt’s monitor, and bringing it into the living room for some 6-player Halo action. All you needed was two consoles, two copies of the game, two screens, and an ethernet switch—or just a crossover cable if you were playing offline (since wifi on consoles wasn’t a thing yet). Four of us would play on the monitor, and the other two cousins would share the TV (cause again the monitor could put out a higher resolution than the TV, so it was better to have the most people on the monitor instead of splitting it 3v3).
It was a lot easier to coordinate and kick ass in online matches, when the team is all in the same room and can see each other’s screens. It was the best time of my life and I miss it dearly. I’ve never had that much fun in a video game since.
</tangent>
