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Some people in the 1970's converted them into inexpensive color computer graphics monitors.

I don't mean hooking up to the RF or composite video input, but directly connecting to the guts of it to get a crisp bitmapped image.

It's a thing people still do to this day, especially to use with game consoles modified to output RGB directly. https://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=56155

Atari's early arcade cabinets used gutted consumer TVs around the same time.