CRT displays are one of those analog technologies that are arguably much cooler than their digital successors. Think – a literan raygun, a particle accelerator, inside your monitor, creating the image you're looking at.
True – but on the other hand, it was "only" a few million elements, and very large ones, compared to, say, the DRAM chips of the time. Monitors certainly make the engineering feat more tangible, though!
It’s certainly one the bits of tech that would be an insane pitch if invented today: “Yes, please stick your face in front of this particle accelerator. I assure you, it’s completely safe. You may experience some visual side effects but that’s completely intended.”
It's much cooler if you haven't used it. That mass of a 19in was crazy. Then you had all of those that had the high pitched noise. And if you were unlucky you had to degauss them. Cool concept, but in practice the digital successors are better.
"I was there" too and somehow this is not my reaction at all.
Everyone knows the obvious reasons we don't use crts any more.
It's true but it's a most uninteresting observation that only cares about practical aspects. Practical aspects matter, none of my own desks has a crt, but they do not define life itself.
Those facts do not at all invalidate the point about the desirable aspects which have been lost, or the fact that the merely interesting and remarkable aspects are interesting and remarkable.
The desirable and/or interesting and remarkable features of a crt are still cool, impressive, fun, desirable, even though we all voluntarily choose to use something else basically everywhere we want a screen because of the practical reasons that just happen to overwhelm.
Trust me, I remember. Cool does not equal convenient. Once a friend and I dragged three extra CRTs to a demo party just so we could put them side by side and write a program that displayed random scrolling messages. Controllable via an IRC bot, even! Today you could do that with a single ultrawide…
