LCDs were indestructible as long as you didn’t leave them out in extremely hot or cold weather.
There are a lot of greyscale radiology monitors available in the used market these days, but they tend to have a relatively high white point and aren't easy on the eyes.
I have good colour and stereo vision, but I'm very shortsighted. I'm also nearly 60 and now wear varifocals with 3 focal lengths for books and phones, computers, and distance.
But 1980s long-persistence-phosphor CRTs looked good to me, were restful to my eyes, and I could and did look at them all day.
On today's flatscreens I can't see the difference between SD and HD, let alone on a TV across the room where it's imperceptible. I can't tell different refresh rates apart, let alone variable ones. I read excited product releases about tear-free video and fixing things I never was able to perceive in the first place and so which did not need fixing.
Now I am losing my choice of good X11 desktops with rich standards-driven keyboard UIs, replaced by phonelike toy desktops which take 10x the RAM and 100x the CPU and GPU and require a whole new display server, and which can't do nine-tenths of the stuff I used in desktops 15 years ago.
Apparently, because of kids with keen eyes who see things I never could.
I suspect all this stuff about HDR and VRR and gamer screens that refresh at 100s of Hertz are just the same as audiophiles who pay absurd sums for gold-plated 100Mb Ethernet cables.
I want to see double-blinded randomised controlled trials to prove that these people can see what they claim to see -- because I don't believe them -- and to prove to them that the bulk of the population can't tell.
I do have a radiology setup I use for writing sometimes, but yeah it's not a general purpose solution. I didn't think about it being the white point so thanks for pointing that out.
The battery life was listed as 2-4 hours. Normally it was under 3 hours. However, with no backlighting and booting a stripped down Mac OS and apps off a RAM disk, I could get close to 6 hours in BBedit or WriteNow. I would spin up the HD to save data and turn it off again.
https://everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_duo/specs/mac_p...
We lost that niche when the industry fully committed to color TFT,and e ink never quite replaced the responsiveness.
I was talking with someone about a post we saw on social media, a $4999 laptop from 1992 or whatever, and it had something like an 8" screen.
"How did people even use those laptops!?"
Then you remember everyone didn't have a laptop for surfing Facebook and Amazon. You probably only had one of those if you were an executive or traveling salesperson.
For some reason I love the computers of the 1980s era, plus minus some more years, even up to about 1995 or so.
Today's computers are of course much more powerful and cheaper per calculating unit, but also more boring. Those things in the 1980s were so wild. Also before that, 1970s. 1950s and 1960s look outright alien - also very cool.
Of course having all that in a small smartphone is epic too, but the hardware today just doesn't interest me anymore. It seems like a "problem solved" whereas in the past, people were trying harder, including micro-optimising all available resources. That required a different kind of creativity.
Perhaps this will come back one day in the future but I doubt it. Quantum computers would mean people don't care much about maximizing everything to the bare metal if things are already mega-fast for most tasks to solve.
I told my wife that in today's dollars, the whole kit would have cost about $11k. It's hard to sink that kind of money into a laptop with OEM accessories today even if you tried hard.
Apple has entered the chat.
A fully specced current-gen MBP gets to about $7,500. Not $11k, but still a pretty expensive device to tote around.
We had the coolest engineering workstation computers, Sun and almost everything else, with the huge CRTs... but strangely cooler, in a way, was the sysadmin's Ethernet diagnostics device.
IIRC, it was built atop a rebadged Toshiba laptop with orange gas plasma display, and included a glowing bar visual display for network traffic (packets? collisions?), with corresponding geiger counter sound effects.
A modern IPS LCD or OLED just wouldn't pair as nicely with the sound. (Analog gauges or Nixie tubes would work, though.)
on mobile, with clock syncronized automatically from mobile provider. Programming is hard.
dolbex•2mo ago