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Displays

Who Still Uses Old Monitors? 305

Posted by Cliff from the old-doesn't-mean-useless dept.
skurrier asks: "Reading the comments for a totally unrelated article, an almost off topic post caught my eye: Someone said that they still had a Sun branded Sony GDM class monitor from way back, and (of course) it rocked then and still rocks. (Sorry, can't find the article, yet alone the comment) As I looked across my desk to that similar Sun branded Sony behemoth plugged into my PC I asked myself: How many people still use ancient monitors? And more importantly, what is the oldest monitor you still use regularly?"
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Who Still Uses Old Monitors? More

Who Still Uses Old Monitors?

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  • Tandy (Score:3, Funny)

    by eyempack ( 239017 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @06:54AM (#7983868) Homepage
    Unforunatly i still have a Monochome monitor on my test bench. You never know when you need to run XGA Graphics
  • I run an old Laser (VTech) 13" VGA monitor when I need to run a kiosk and need the 17" to stay on a tower.

  • Apple branded Sony here (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dark Nexus ( 172808 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @06:56AM (#7983876)
    A nice 20" Trinitron from 1996. Not REALLY old, but better than most monitors from 1996. Still a decent match for any current curved-screen monitor, actually. Well, in everything but refresh rate.

    It gets me 1600x1200x32, so I'm happy.
    • Same deal here, except for the Apple brand.

      I don't play games that require killer refresh rates, so the display issue is for crispness and size.

      The rest of the system is much the same. If parts need an upgrade that will actually help me, it gets done, else I'm happy with what is there.
    • I just replaced 4 21" Sony monitors 500 and 520 series, don't remember the letters, at a client site. The client was nice enough to donate these still working monitors to a friend of mine whose child is close to blind. 640x480 @ 75Hz on a 21" monitor is perfect for my friend's son. The monitors were manufactured in 1995 or 1996 and they're still going strong.

      I have a 19" Mitsubishi Diamondtron (I think)from 1999 or 2000 on my G5 at home. The monitor still looks great. I can get 1600x1200 @ 85 Hz.

      --Mike

    • My Magnabox branded Philips monitor (from my first computer, a 12 Mhz Magnabox 286) survived 9 years through out several generations of hardware. Back in 1992 I was the only one my classroom with a VGA monitor and tough the max res was just 800x600 I loved that 14" old style monitor. It was very sad to see it die.

      Found memories of downloading babe pics (not even soft porn) from my local BBS and see them in all their 16 bit glory came back to me man.

  • IBM 3151 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by krymsin01 ( 700838 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:02AM (#7983889) Homepage Journal
    Not exactly a monitor, but I've got a IBM 3151 terminal hooked up to the serial port on my machine at home. Makes a nice dedicated mp3 player. Bought it at Goodwill for $3 (including keyboard).
    • When it does go south, sell the keyboard. IBM wants $150 to replace one when they go south.
      • Yeah I got the IBM "buckling spring" keyboard, and the GIGANTIC Sony/Sun 20" on my KVM.

        • Re:IBM 3151 (Score:3, Interesting)

          by bhtooefr ( 649901 )
          He's not talking about the Model M (this post was typed on a genuine IBM, not a Lexmark, Model M), he's talking about the old AS/400 terminal keyboards. That's some big iron (and I'm just talking about the METAL, not the processing power (which is nil)).

    • Re:IBM 3151 (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The oldest monitor I currently have is in the closet. It's a 14" or 13" SVGA monitor that I've had since about 1998 - maybe earlier. It was probably used when I got it. At one point, it was left out in the drizzling rain for a couple hours. The next time I plugged it in to use, it shto out three foot flames from the top of the chassis (singing the whole top black) after about an hour of use. Now, it still catches fire routinely - so when you use it, you shouldn't wanter away and leave it unattended.

      But my

    • Re:IBM 3151 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ptomblin ( 1378 )
      I've got a DEC vt220 hooked up to my serial port. I use it for checking email (mutt) and Usenet news (trn) when somebody else is using the console screen for something graphical. Since my oldest step-daughter got a laptop, I hardly ever use it.

    • DEC vt420 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ShaggyZet ( 74769 )
      I have a vt 420 hooked up with a serial switch to be the console on 4 servers. I call it a poor man's KVM. (though I guess that's not technically correct since the M stands for mouse) The cables are just plain serial, the switch was about 20 bucks, and the vt 420 was free. It's a pain to find MMJ cables, so I usually make them myself.
    • Just the other day I had a few friends over for a small starcraft LAN party. Turns out we were one monitor short, so we rigged my friends box up to an old 1983? 1985? Mitsubishi TV.

      The resolution was a little (ok, a lot) crappy, but it worked. And it was damned cool at the time, too.
  • I Can't remember the model, but I googled for it and searched the Gateway site, and can find absolutely no references to that model. Works fine as VESA.
  • I had a huge old monitor until recently, when I moved into a third-floor flat in an old Victorian house.
    I gave the old monitor away to the first person who wanted it, and now have a flat panel display - a lot easier to carry up all those stairs.
    Were it not for the move, I would have continued to use the old monitor until it died.
    • I have some 9" monitors, 800x600, that I use when I can't be arsed carrying my 17" monitor about. They're OK. I need to remember to uncomment 800x600 before I start X, though. Great for LAN parties, you can carry the PC with one hand and the monitor under your other arm, and still lock the car when you park.
  • My KVM switch has a Samsung Syncmaster 15 attached - it's pretty dodgy, but it's still working well enough not to replace. Works for my Windows and FreeBSD servers, machines that friends bring over for updates, etc, and any machine I happen to be playing around with.

    I occasionally plug my Macintosh Colour Display (13") when Dad brings up his powerbook, but that monitor's just started making sqealing noises ...

  • MAME (Score:2, Interesting)

    by gnudutch ( 235983 )
    I use throw-away VGA monitors in MAME hardware projects.

  • Pff (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:12AM (#7983927)
    Young whippersnappers! I'm still using a dot-matrix printer for a display, and I like it that way!

    • Re:Pff (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:31AM (#7983993)
      Bah. Back in my day we just have rows of wires sticking out of the box. We didn't even have any bulbs for them, you'd have to work out what was high by putting it into your mouth and seeing if you got a shock...

    • Re:Pff (Score:2)

      by dago ( 25724 )
      In fact I still have one at home and eventually used it for a long time when I begun university. Was a DECwriter III

      Oh, and it should be as old as me (born in 79) ... I'm not _that_ old ;)
    • Printer? Pff indeed. I think you mispeled "Teletype ASR" [columbia.edu]
    • Dot matrix!?!!?!!

      Too much of a pussy to read punch cards???? Kids today! Hell in a hand basket, I tell ya!

  • 10 year old 14" TVM (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zork the Almighty ( 599344 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:18AM (#7983956) Journal
    I have and use a 14" TVM monitor from 1992. Does 640x480@70, 800x600@56, and 1024x768@43.5 *interlaced*. Attached to a 486 DX/50 w/ 8mb of ram running Gentoo linux. I need all the compiler flags I can get ! This is not a joke.
    • I've got an ancient (1992-ish) 14" Dell monitor attached to my RH9 server... I managed to find timings (on Dell's website no less -- impressed the hell out of me) for 640x480. It doesn't support anything higher. It was donated to me from my sister.

      The oldest monitor I use on a regular basis is my ViewSonic 21PS from 1996.

      Sadly a LCD flatscreen is nowhere in my near future... even if my monitor or my wife's monitor (a 19" VS) died we have two spare 19" monitors from when we both ran 2 computers.
    • please tell me you did not bootstrap that installation ON the 486?

      i have a P75 that i was going to start using as a dedicated firewall, moving it off my duallie setup. but was certainly going to do the compile on another machine and possibly only compile the kernel, and stage3 setup on the box itself.

      machine will share monitors with the duallie fileserver which has a gateway2000 branded 17" sony from 91. which i actually got on warrantee from an older (ca. 1990) exact same spec 17" gateway2000 branded s

  • VT420 (Score:2)

    by tsa ( 15680 )
    I have a VT420 terminal that I use regularly at home. When I start it up it says (c) 1989 somewhere but I have no idea how old it really is.

  • Why? (Score:2)

    by smoon ( 16873 )
    I've got an old IBM 8215 out in the garage I can fire up -- Will that make me some kind of he-man uber-hacker?

    I've got a sissy-ass 17" imac and love it, but maybe I could strengthen the lampshade-arm and bolt on the old CRT...

  • I have a 12" Wang (Score:5, Funny)

    by vipw ( 228 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @07:40AM (#7984023)
    I really think the subject says it all.

    Seriously though, it's real. It has a vga connector and can do 640x480 in 4 glorious shades of gray.
    • To delve even deeper into the depths of adolescent humor...

      Sitting through the Ph.D. walk-throughs at my graduation last June, I counted at least two Dr. Wangs and one Dr. Fang. I couldn't decide which name I would want more. :-)
  • as stated, should date back from the eighties, makes a perfect console in the closet.

    (haven't plugged my VT yet)
  • I have a firewall and fileserver at home; there's a KVM switch on them, with an old-ish Packard-Bell 15" monitor. It was free, and gives me console access to the boxes, in lieu of having to have buy PC hardware to allow true serial console connections (these are low-end whiteboxes.)

    Old monitors are great for this stuff--when they die, you just dump them (here in Switzerland, there is a recycling tax on all electronic equipment; anyone who sells anything electrical or electronic is obliged by law to take
  • ...but at work we have 2 286's with their original monitors (run as terminals for tills), 2 386's with their original monitors, one in the stockroom (terminal) and one in the office, which runs the entire store stock control and EPOS system.

    The only two computers to have trouble with their monitors are the two 486's in the service area. One has a dodgy power button, and the other just died a few weeks ago. Don't make 'em like they used to.

  • The monochrome monitors we use at our test benches at work are some old HP brand.
    Some of them have swivel screens.

    The video input is an RCA jack!

    The 'computers' are old HP Series 300 stations.
  • 14" VGA monitor that takes 20mins to warm up, though this time is decreased with vertical encouragement. Used all the time to:

    - check freenode via bitchx
    - config router

    I'd love to show a pic, especially alongside the router with no case as it's laughable ...but the website it serves totally hides this.

    In fact all my monitors are old - 15" at best and CRT :p

    But... they don't lose pixels and are faily bomb proof!
  • The oldest monitor lying around at home is the original monitor [blaatieblaat.net] that came with an Apple IIe. At that time (80's) it had a fairly nice design. It had a composite (banana?) video-in connector and hence was actually a TV monitor.

    When I was playing with video camera's and a Panasonic 'digital' video editing board [cgi.ebay.ch], I used the Apple as a monitor of my incoming video signal. :-)

    Ten years later the thing still works, but not used anymore.

  • I just picked up a working Apple IIc with a working monitor, but for PC use I use a Sony 500PS that was a couple of years old, but still "new" when I bought it in 2000. As you say, still rocks.

  • Amiga Forever! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mithras the prophet ( 579978 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @08:54AM (#7984338) Homepage Journal
    I watch TV on my 1987 Commodore Amiga 13" monitor. Hey, it works!
    • My TV monitor is a Sony GVM-1311Q [ebay.com], which was also used as high-end Amiga monitor.

      It does Progressive NTSC, SVGA up to 800x600, RGB, and EGA. Same tube as the old AppleColor 13 monitors -- it weighs a ton. My Commodore 1084S is now sitting on a shelf.
  • I bought a Hitachi CM751 19" monitor when it came out here in Denmark (late 1997, I think). It was the first monitor larger than 17 inches that didn't cost more than $3000. It is still my main monitor and I expect it to last at least a couple more years.

    Of course nowadays I can get a 19" flat-screen for about half of what I paid back then - but I have something that works very well so I'll wait for the prices to come down a bit more.

  • The color quality of my 1987 IBM XGA is still unmatched.
  • I use a Sun-branded GDM-17E20 at home. It's one of the sharpest displays I've ever used. I moved from an old Acer to this new display and I was amazed at the clarity. I'll pick up another as soon as I get the chance. Hooray for non-standard plugs, they sure do drive prices down after a few years.
    • I was fortunate enough to work at a place that resold used Sun hardware. I was even luckier to be working on the floor as a tester and system configurator. We couldn't sell monitors that failed our (arguably arbitrary) standards for brightness, clarity, etc. I ended up shelling out $40 for a VGA to Sun video adapter, and got a free, but "dim" (wink, wink) 20-inch Sony monitor...not cheap back in 1998.

      It finally got replaced last month by a 18.1" Dell UltraSharp LCD (same size corner-to-corner), but it s

    • My girlfriend uses this at home on her Linux box. We've never quite worked out how to get Windows to generate the right scan rates.

  • Iiyama Vision Master 500 (Score:3, Informative)

    by forged ( 206127 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @09:15AM (#7984463) Homepage Journal
    This superb 21" CRT monitor [epinions.com] is "only" 6 years old... But with an average of 10-hours/day of use, the display is still as bright & crisp today as it was back on the first day I got it. These were surely the best 2500 German Marks I have ever spent on computer hardware. I cannot praise Iiyma [iiyama.com] enough for the monitors they are manufacturing !!@
    • I'm still using an Iiyama VM Pro 450 [epinions.com] (19") here at work from around 1997. I had a VM 450 at home (closest match [epinions.com] not the same as the VM Pro 450), but it stopped working almost 2 years ago.

      I've always been very pleased by Iiyama's monitors, but the replacement I bought 2 years ago was an NEC monitor, which is the best aperture grill screen I've ever seen (though I haven't seen Iiyama's newer monitors, since the 450 line is up to 455 for the AG screens, I bought the non-pro 450 for home use specifically becau
    • I'm still using my Iiyama Vision Master Pro 17. It is seven years old this month (Happy Birthday!). I knew then that putting $700 into a monitor was a good investment, and never regretted it. Ever since, whenever I work on or see a cheapo monitor, the fuzzy characters and lines are really distracting. The only problem this monitor has developed is an intermittent color problem at the highest color temperature (fixed by using a lower color temperature). Now, if only I could find a BNC monitor cable to u
  • I have a 14" Thomson EGA monitor here that I use for a IBM PC XT that I recently acquired. I play with it regularly, putting in old floppies that I find around the house to see if they worked. I've had it since 1988 or so, when I had a 286.
  • Between my Digital VT420 terminal, or my Vintage 1993 CTX 14" CRT hooked up to a 386 40mhz/8mb ram box.

  • Sun monitors rock... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Kevin Burtch ( 13372 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @09:33AM (#7984567)

    I also have an ancient 19" Sun branded Sony Trinitron monitor, still just as usable as it was when it was new (over a decade ago).
    It's hooked up to a SPARCstation 10 from the same era, though it's been hopped up a bit (dual 166MHz HyperSPARC CPUs).

    The only drawback to this monitor is an advantage in the winter... it produces more heat than any monitor I've ever seen.
    I don't even need to run my heater most nights, but then I live in South Florida (yes, it does get down into the 40s down here). :)
    • It's currently 2 degrees out here, with a windchill factor of -13, and the low tonight will be -15. Shaddup.
    • Those of us who haven't seen the high side of 0F for 2 days (and didn't see it for 5 days last week) scoff at your complaint that the temperature gets down into the 40s.

      • Please keep in mind that dwellings in the north are insulated and have much more efficient heaters.
        Try sleeping with the windows partway open (the windows down here are single-pane, and leak horribly) when it's 40F and windy.

        I grew up in Michigan.
        Same thing is/was true in reverse... 20 years ago, very few houses had air-conditioning (and Michigan _does_ get in the high-90s in mid-summer).

  • The compact Macs - 9" mono Mac SE, 1987 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @09:33AM (#7984568) Homepage
    I have a Mac SE which is still in use. Anyone with an old compact Mac will be able to boast some fairly old kit...

    Cheers,
    Ian

  • Possibly could have been me, I use a pair of 20" Sun branded Sony GDM-20e20's at work, and have a damaged one at home that needs a few parts to repair(the screen is pincushioned heavily, and the pincushion control won't work.)

    I use a 21" Sun branded Sony 5010pt at home now, does 1600x1200x75hz nicely, and if i could stand the flicker would do 2048x1536x60, still readable. The 20e20's will only do 65hz refresh at 1600x1200. Much fun to get THAT working under windows. I run them at 1400x1050x75 at work.

    T
  • I'm typing this looking at my HP A1097C monitor. I believe it's 10 or more years old. It's 19", Sync On Green, fixed frequency running 1280x1024 @ 72Hz.

    It came from an old HP X-Terminal, and I rescued it from being thrown out at a former place of work.

    It has a few problems. It's Sync On Green, which means it won't work with most graphics cards. Luckily, Matrox video cards for some unknown reason are able to output a SoG signal.

    It doesn't support DPMS.

    Although it works fine under X windows, I've yet
  • is still my commodore 64 monitor from way back in '86. works better than most tvs i've owned.

    i don't use it on my computer, but it's still a monitor.
  • ..I've got is a 17" that came bundled with a 486/100 circa 1994(?). One of my previous employers was going to have it hauled off with a bunch of other old equipment (and pay for the disposal) so I managed to convince them to let me have it. The case has gone yellow, but it still works well enough to act as a 2nd monitor for my primary machine.
  • I'm not really sure how old my CRT is... I just checked powerstrip [entechtaiwan.com], and it says "1998, ISO week 0" under date of manufacture. It was given to me by someone who couldn't stand the high pitch squeaky sound it makes at low refresh rates. ;)

    Thankfully, it doesn't really do it at 1280x1024@85, so I kinda lucked out. It has some other issues though, namely, there's a bit of blurring that occurs in a certain part of the screen. I don't know if it is due to the guns wearing out or what. Anyway, for a free 19

  • I have an old 9" Heathkit amber monitor (NTSC video) I built for an Altair kit computer in the '70s. I think the monitor was a 1980 kit. It's currently hooked up to an old radio shack Tandy 1000HX next to my front door we use for a family calendar/in-out box/leave a note for mom thingy.

    I also have two 1982 Magnavox separated video monitors (color), one is being used as a TV monitor on a VCR tape/DVD deck and the other still serves an ATARI 800XL (1 meg ram upgrade with 500 mb hard drive) that I use for qu
  • I have a VT 320 connected to my Linux machine, does that count.

    I also have a working apple 2e that I turn on from time to time that has the original apple branded monitor.
  • I know a lot of people swear by ancient monitors, and whatever works for them is fine, but when I was looking to buy a monitor I dropped by my local computer surplus shop (They sell retired business equipment, overstock castoffs, liquidated equipment, etc.) They were very happy to hook a number up for me to show me how they looked. I looked at a beastly but rather old 19" Sony Trinitron monitor whose model number I forget, a completely ancient Sun 21" workstation monitor, and a nearly new Viewsonic P95+. Al
  • My poor kids are still stuck with the ancient 14" Amstrad monitor that came with my first PC, a 486-33SX. I say ancient, but I suppose it's only about 10 years old.

    Maximum resolution is 800x600 and sometimes the screen goes pink. You have to hit the side of the screen for it to go back to normal.

    And I wonder why they always use my computer...
  • I use an ex-corporate 21" Sun-branded GDM-5010PT [sun.com] which I bought for about 100GBP nearly two years ago. Bargain.

    I gave my dad my old 17" monitor, which was a Viglen Envy (probably MAG or something) that my employer had dropped down the stairs whilst moving. It's still working.

    The only old monitors I don't still use are my PAL Philips 8852 from my Amiga days, and the 15" Iiyama which I bought with my first PC, back in 1995 for about 300GBP. That's the most expensive monitor I've ever bought!

    --

  • I use an Apple III monitor from 1983 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by John Harrison ( 223649 ) <johnharrison@@@gmail...com> on Thursday January 15, 2004 @11:16AM (#7985516) Homepage Journal
    I have an Apple III monitor, built in 1983 that I have rewired to use as a analog visualization device on my home stereo. Don't try this at home! I have had a monitor of a different brand start smoking after doing this. I basically cut the wires leading to the coils at the back of the CRT tube so that they no longer get a signal from the board. Then I routed the stereo wires through them, left for horizontal and right for vertical. It makes fancy green images on my screen.

    I have also written a little WinAmp pluggin to demo the effect, since you can't download my old monitor. It is here. [angelfire.com] Go into the Preferences panel, select Plug-ins, then Visualization. Select the vis_text.dll pluggin and then in the drop-down box at the bottom select Strange.

  • I have two 21" Sony Trinitron monitors that are at least 10 years old. They're set up in a dual screen configuration, and I will never, ever, get rid of them. I've gotten too used to having all this desktop space that I'm not sure I can go back to something smaller, and it's going to be a long time before you can get good quality 21" LCD's at a price cheap enough for my employer to want to buy them for me.
  • I have an old TV with a dial and simulated wood grain cabinet. I use it to play my Atari.

  • Ahhh, Hercules... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by lburdet ( 552112 )
    The good 'ole Hercules orange on black 12" is all a 486 LRP router really needs...
  • Sun-branded Trinitron I picked up off the roadside in Mountain View CA.

    My ancient 15 inch Trinitron (the last monitor I actually purchased, some 8 years ago) is currently suffering from a near-failure cable that my ex-roomate in college pushed over the edge. I have 2 17 inch trinitrons scavenged from work, one's old and one has a screen that was windexed.
    • Is windex counter-indicated? Why?

      • Re:I have.... (Score:3, Informative)

        by cmowire ( 254489 )
        Windex and a large category of other cleaning solutions for monitors are counterindicated.

        First, they may attack the anti-glare coatings of the screen, which is what happened to one of my monitors before I acquired it.

        Second, they may set your monitor on fire if they produce any flamable vapors. This happened more than once in the eighties.

        Third, a damp cloth does a perfectly good job of cleaning monitors, with perhaps a little bit of dish soap.
  • NEC Multisync that my dad had on his 286-10Mhz circa 1985. I'm too cheap to throw things away, and this dumb thing refuses to die. It does 640x480 barely, but I use it in text mode on my Linux server. This monitor is older than half the folks on Slashdot!

    You know your monitor is old if it has a vertical hold adjustment knob.

  • Amdek Color-I (Score:2, Interesting)

    by CmdrTHAC0 ( 229186 )

    Yep, not even the Color-I Plus. No power LED for us!

    My dad's had to repair it a couple times, but we still run it for video gaming. Man, that thing's had more stuff connected to it....

    • 2 C= 64s*
    • C= Plus 4
    • 2 C= Amiga 500s** (running OS 1.2 and 1.3...)
    • NES
    • Super NES
    • Sony PlayStation
    • Currently, a PS2
    • And the occasional VCR being repaired for friends

    * I believe the Ohio Scientific with a huge 8K RAM used a different monitor, and the C= 64 was the original reason this one was purchased. But I'm too young to

  • for the old machine and as a backup.

    I still prefer CRTs over flatscreen LCDs. Even at work, I was offered for LCD flatscreens, but I told them to give me CRTs for work.

    LCDs are fine for laptops, but not for desktop to me. I will get a flatscreen LCD when its technology improves enough to match CRTs.
  • I still have 3 GDM 1962s all hanging off of my SS1000, all in a row. The one on the left is for Opera and Firebird -- the one in the middle is where most of my xterms live, and the one on the right runs nothing but a maximized Emacs.

    I surely am going to die from excessive X-Ray exposure.



  • Zenith Flat 14" VGA - around 1988 Zenith came out with a flat CRT. The thing was gorgeous - the things cost around $1100. IT *REAALY* was flat - it wasen't a curved tube with a bunch of thick glass on it to make it look flat. built like a tank.

    IBM 17" Monochrome MGA/XVGA monitor - circa 1990. This monochrome monitor was the best thing ever for text. You could get it to sync at 120HZ - really. Andbecause it was monochrome the dot pitch for the shadow mask was really really small.

  • I have two original, green-screen Apple ][ monitors (and one color one) that I use for -- you guessed it -- my lovingly-restored, original Apple //e.

  • Commodore 1702 (Score:3, Informative)

    by almightyjustin ( 518967 ) <dopefishjustin AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday January 15, 2004 @12:52PM (#7986682) Homepage
    Color monitor, got it for $5 at a rummage sale. I used it for a long time for all my video game systems as the display quality is better than a TV. The N64 seemed to periodically give it fits with syncing though - guess it wasn't designed for that sort of thing. ;)

    Now I only use it for the C64 but it's still working. The shielding is awful though - I have a 17" SVGA monitor right next to it, and as long as the 1702 is on, the screen on the other is all wavy.

  • This must be the slowest day ever at /. . Come on since when is "my monitor is older than yours a news story!!!!.

  • Can't beat Sun or SGI (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Sun and SGI both resold top notch Sony GDM monitors. Best of all, they're dirt cheap now. Watch out for incompatible 13W3 connectors. Still you can get a 21" multi-sync (1600x1200x85Hz) for under $200. Expect to pay $75 - $100 shipping - those puppies are heavy. SGI also had a 24" 16:9 [ebay.com] that did 1920x1080x85Hz for HDTV production and CAD. At 90 lbs, it was definitely a "two-person" lift.
  • I'm still running an old Iiyama 21'' monitor. Since I bought it used, I'm not sure exactly how old it is, but I think that it was built in the late '80s. It's still wonderful. It's bright, the colors are pretty, and I can stare at it for hours (my wife doesn't like that!) if I have to, without any headaches.

    Even though it's well over ten years old, it's still a better monitor than most of my friends have on their machines.

    Since it is very well built, both mechanically and electronically (I took it

  • Commodore 64 Monitors! (Plus others) (Score:3, Informative)

    by Inexile2002 ( 540368 ) * on Thursday January 15, 2004 @02:03PM (#7987672) Homepage Journal
    My original Commodor 64 Monitor is still in great shape and runs in a bank of monitors my buddy has in his basement. They've got four working Commodore 64 monitors and a 27 inch tv with several game systems all hooked up. People will crowd in, bring over their XBoxes (XBoxen?) or Gamecubes and have ourselves a good old fashioned geek out. That same Commodore 64 monitor served as my tv in my residence room in University, was the screen I watched my first porno movie on in grade school and most important - was the screen that ran all those amazing Commodore 64 games. Space Taxi, Jump Man and Ghostbusters are still some of my all time favourites. The thing is coming up on 20 years old and still works like a charm.

    Also, if you're in Canada - check out the occasional government surplus auctions. They're always selling these amazing old monitors for practically nothing. A couple of years back I picked up this behemoth 23 inch monitor that must have been a decade old. Still worked and was great for gaming. $45 bucks. When the brightness started to go, I managed to find a 21" Dell branded Trinitron knock off (or some kind of flatscreen) for $100.

    Also, a buddy of mine ripped the monitor out of an old broken Mac Classic - one of those little black and white 9 inch monitors and incorporated it into some art project he did. It and 7 other monitors ripped free of their housings are arranged in some weird gothic metal looking statue thing. It's outfitted with cheap motion sensors and low quality video cameras and will display all kinds of weirdness based on what's going on around it.
  • Do serial consoles count?

    If so, WYSE WY-60 (doesn't have its year of manufacture on the back plate) and an old Toshiba T-1200 laptop with its monochrome (blue on grey) LCD are the oldest displays I use regularly.

    I too have a Sun-Branded Sony monster that outweighs any "modern" monitor... Sad part is these things outperform them all too.

    PLUS its a flat CRT :-D

  • Sony Trinitrons last forever (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Thursday January 15, 2004 @03:26PM (#7988829)
    My main monitor is a ten year old Sony 19in 300sf, I try to recalibrate it once in a while and it doesn't need it, no color drift or fade after years and years of use.
    I still routinely use an ancient Apple (Sony trinitron) 13in color monitor, yeah the ancient one that only does 640x480. I plug it into my OS X headless server whenever I need to do maintenance directly instead of by remote. That monitor has to be 15 years old minimum.

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