The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen

construction-physics.com

49 pointssurprisetalk32 comments

Gosh, it sure seems like this author got a lot of this history from the "Gas and Glass" chapter of my book THE FRIENDLY ORANGE GLOW (Pantheon Books, 2017), which is a history of the PLATO system including the invention of the plasma display. Or maybe he got it from an AI that got it from vacuuming up my book.

Funny how the article has zero citations or notes.

So it goes.

Sorry to hear that. So disappointed in the AI companies for making no serious efforts towards transparency for the citation of works and prior art.

One could always copy things without credit. It was always up to people to have ethics and cite their sources.

While we should hold AI companies accountable, I feel like this one is on the person making the LLM generate, without also making it come up with sources (which it can do!)

No, if you build a machine on plagiarism that plagiarizes on command for money, it’s absolutely your fault for making the lazy option so easy and affordable at scale.

People are creating agents that get pirated PDF copies of books and them make articles out of paraphrasing entire chapters to generate youtube AI slop videos and SEO slop blogs.

Your book looks like it will be fascinating! I ordered through bookshop.org since I already have an account, but do you have a preferred retailer for others who might want to buy it?

http://friendlyorangeglow.com/

Hmm, the link doesn't work for me (just get https redirect + can't connect immediately after)

Before LCDs won the race to price affordability, there were many competing novel approaches to display technology. Many engineering teams were based in the south bay but they all lost out to LCDs which won out by being good enough at the time at a price people could afford. Lots were vying for government contracts (this was a time when Japan "owned" compact display technologies.) Obviously they all lost out to LCDs and derivatives.

This would be right up my alley! Have you got a preferred store/link to purchase?

I read your book years ago, previously knowing nothing about PLATO. Loved it, couldn't put it down. Thanks for writing that. I learned so much about a really interesting part of online history, and I still think about your book frequently. It's one that really stuck with me.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Orange dot-matrix gas plasma displays were used on pinball machines for over 2 decades before the manufacturers switched to colour LCD screens. Now instead of clever pixel art and high legibility we have cheesy CGI and so much information on screen that I have no idea what to shoot for…

Star Trek: TNG uses one of those displays to great effect. Interactive mini-games, great 1-bit graphics, really clear instructions and directives. It makes for a great game.

I loved my 50ish inch Panasonic plasma tv. It’s still used in our cottage. The blacks are deep, no blur and remote control response was instant unlike a lot of modern smart tvs.

Me too, I have a 15 year old Panasonic 60” that I’m still daily driving until the proverbial wheels fall off. I’m not looking forward to tv shopping in the smart-garbage-infested marketplace of today…

Yeah, I had a Panasonic plasma too the picture was so much better (well in many ways at least) than the new generation. It seemed a lot more "analog" for lack of a better term.

I have a 20-year-old 46" Panasonic plasma TV that still works great. My favorite thing about it is the perfect picture no matter the viewing angle. I was reluctant to buy a new TV for years because for many LED TVs, the picture faded as soon as you move away from being directly in front of the TV.

I have one that I got from the free area of my old building. Unfortunately, it stopped taking HDMI input so its basically useless.

I have a 50" Panasonic plasma tv too as my bedroom TV. It's going to outlast my 2018 Samsung Frame TV that's having some type of backlight failure

For sure it will. The remote won’t - that’s the first thing to go usually. but just buy one off eBay.

Really wish we could have gotten SED[1] or FED... imagine the motion clarity of CRT with the size and weight of LCD. There's still nothing like it... even 500hz OLED still can't match it, you'd really need double that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-em...

They would have still probably been very power hungry.

When I started at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne in 1988, the computer labs were still filled with PLATO terminals. They were extremely cool--nice displays, and many were also touch screens. I did my physics homework on them, and played games but I definitely didn't use them to their full extent.

Looking at photos of them now they appear blocky and relatively ugly, but I remember them fondly.

Have one of the last Samsung plasmas and one of the best ever made that still has some amazing picture quality and will take 10 bit color input

i have lg 60 inch plasma from 2014. it's a good tv

Plasma screens, like computer case windows, are incredibly rude but the people using them have no idea that their behavior is inappropriate. Both emit significant amounts of HF radio interference which bounces around the ionosphere degrading a shared resource for all of Earth. And even more VHF and up interference which only degrades a shared resource till the next hill. It's pretty much just like littering in a public park.

I was surprised to learn this just now.

probably un learn it, it's cap

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the powers that be, so fond of censorship and control, actually think making HF amateur radio unusable is a nice outcome.

Computer case windows cause hf interference in the ionosphere?

They don't, if GP's does the FCC would be very interested in knowing his location

There's a reason that high speed switching electronics have metal cases. And it's understandable that most people don't know babinet's principle as it applies to RF antenna (basically a hole in a conductor is exactly equivalent to a conductor of that same size and shape: the case window is an antenna). The FCC wouldn't care about me because I intentionally use full metal cases for all my high speed switching electronics and monitor my RF environment from 20 to 3700 MHz over various SDR devices 24/7/365.

I'll grant that a ~meter size slot antenna (case window) is not exactly big enough to be resonant at HF but compromise antennas are the standard for HF and they still work; just because HF propagates so well even at low powers. And lets not forget they such a case window slot antenna is resonant around higher frequencies like ~144 Mhz where the GPU memory is blasting and pulling large currents over long conductors.

If the FCC actually tested a modern computers in their shipped window or completely glass computer cases they likely they wouldn't allow it to be sold commercially. But they're much too busy with politics and as long as it doesn't interfere with military use or high frequency trading they don't care about HF.

Anyway, I do see that no one is disagreeing about the radio intereference caused by plasma TVs. That's good, because they're terrible offenders.

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