I think my favorite contextual example of this is the opening line from Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Means something very different now.

I wonder if 2000n years from now, scholars will be wondering over the meaning of that sentence, the same way that they currently discuss the meaning of "wine-dark sea" in the Iliad and the Odyssey (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer))

That section on ancient languages tending to lack blue is very interesting. I wonder if there was just a lack of blue in their environment. If the local birds and flowers don't contain any blue, then you just have the sky and the sea(or whatever large body of water.)

If the majority of the blue you see in the world is the sky and the sea, would you just start to think of blue as a blank? If you just consider blue as something more like we consider white, then any competing hues dominate what you describe. So just like white with the tiniest bit of red becomes pink, a purplish sea becomes red?

Homer’s wine-dark sea leads down an interesting rabbit-hole of thinking about perception, other minds, shared labels for sensations, how one individual consciousness is shaped by (exists only in context of?) others, and the implications of the information age with more extensive inter-mind connections and increasingly numerous and specific shared labels.

I guess that means perfect blue skies these days haha

Neil Gaiman made a joke about this in 1996 in the novel Neverwhere. Search for "dead channel at http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2004/12/some-days-bears-on-top...

Or black sky with a moving "NO SIGNAL" notification box. That would actually fit to a cyberpunk novel I guess. ;-)

I still remember dragging my CRT around to LAN parties... oh the good old days... was such a pain in the ass though in reality...

Those Sony Trinitron's were literally were made of lead. My back still hurts, but the 20" was worth it!

Was that the one with the demagnitize button? I used to slap the monitor while pushing the button so my coworkers would think I hit it so hard the image bounced around

All the better ones had that button, usually named "degauss". My 22" flat CRT (it was flat on the front, like LCDs today, which was a great feature at the time, but made the thing extremely expensive and extremely heavy) had a degauss function that was apparently so powerful it visibly distorted the image on other monitors right next to it when I degaussed mine. I made a joke of doing that in the middle of games on LAN parties ;-) didn't work repeatedly though, after degaussing once I had to wait for some time until degaussing again would actually do something.

I made the mistake of pressing Degauss on a monitor while holding a magnet next to it.

This basically calibrated the thing to look normal... with the magnet there. It took quite a while to restore to normal.

I finally replaced my aging CRT at work (3rd screen for unimportant stuff) after it finally died after 20 years of service. I still miss pressing the degauss button, which (perhaps relatedly) needed to be pressed after powering on and sometimes multiple times during the day.

Numerous monitors had degaussing features, Sony's among them.

And if they didn't, and somehow you managed to magnetize it, you needed to use a degaussing coil, moving it away from the screen in a spiralling motion... ah, the memories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pVLizAHby4

I assume that by "somehow managed to magnetize it" you mean "had crappy detachable boom box speakers sitting on top of it in college, causing the TV to eventually display distorted blobs at the top edge of the image".

No? Huh, guess it was just me ;)

I honestly don't know. I picked up a Compaq monitor with a magnetized grille from the trash in 2002 or so, and used for my secondary pc (a venerable P200 MMX that took a LONG time to recompile the 2.4 kernel on a then-unstable Debian Sarge).

No idea how the previous owner managed to magnetize it, it never happened to me.

I did that, and figured out if you flipped the speaker around, you could "paint" the distortion away.

And 120hz refresh rates... almost 20 years ago!

Yeah, and I had 3d shutter glasses that worked great with the trinitron... In 2000 or so. Nvidia 3d Vision came along later but now sadly those product lines are abandoned, I guess due to VR which is just not what I want at all

Wow, such memories with the 3D Vision. Was quite visionary. And indeed I had to buy a Sony Trinitron with 120Hz refresh otherwise it wouldn't work.

I remember playing MoH:AA, the play experience was quite out of this world.

Coincidentally, my whole team still uses Nvidia 3d Vision 2 at work, despite lack of support from Nvidia. One of the reasons I took the job is because I saw they were using it. Not having access to those systems is one of the hardships of working at home. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7638&fbclid=I...

I never noticed a benefit over 70 or so. The flicker of 60 made my eyes bleed though. Then with LCDs 60 was fine.

I still don't know what it is about 60 Hz that made me see the flicker plainly as a strobing light. TVs at 50 Hz—nothing (other than being generally bleh back then). Had to use 800x600 instead of 1024x768 just to have 85 Hz instead.

On LCDs, I still can see faint flicker on some static backgrounds, and I think 60 Hz might play a role here too—though it seems to also depend on the brightness and Flux being on or off. E.g. on https://marctenbosch.com/news/

Three reasons: You sit much closer to a computer screen compared to a TV, so your peripheral vision has a better chance with the computer screen to see flicker. Computer CRTs supported higher refresh rates, so they used phosphors with shorter afterglow (otherwise you'd get ghosting/S&H-like artifacts like TFTs produce). You can notice this one when you photograph a computer CRT vs. photographing a TV with the same shutter speed. And at the end of CRT TVs a lot of them were 100 Hz.

Interesting hypotheses, though I still can't quite accept them as final. I seem to recall that the effect was much more noticeable, not only when sitting in front of the screen—basically enter the room and there it is. And I think that I've experimented with lower refresh rates too, at least I definitely had the time and inclination—but can't remember if the monitor allowed them with the available resolutions. It's stuck in my memory that only 60 Hz does this.

When I get rich and have lots of free time, I'll probably buy a bunch of old CRTs just to dig to the roots of this.

Btw, I count only two reasons there.

(1) You sit much closer ... (2) Computer CRTs supported ... (3) And at the end ...

The LCDs you see this on are 6-bit color displays using temporal dithering to pretend to be 8-bit color.

The reason for flickering on specific patterns is independent of temporal dithering. This is caused by cyclic polarity inversion: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/inversion.php

(temporal dithering usually is visible as slight noise on darker shades)

That's why drop shadows look horrible when I'm looking at my screen at the wrong angle... I knew it was a dithering thing, forgot LCDs were 6-bit.

Only cheap/low-end LCDs are 6 bit. Most are 8 bit with no dithering.

Should this be the case with a Macbook, even if a sorta old one? Because that's the machine I've seen the flicker on, for the past bunch of years.

AC power is 60hz so room lighting (especially florescent) also flickers at 60hz. It’s a sort of wagon wheel effect.

I dropped a hint right there that the AC frequency is definitely not 60 Hz where I am.

Actually you didn't. There were many countries that used PAL for TV broadcasts but have 60hz AC.

They didn't say PAL, they said "50 Hz TV."

PAL and 50 Hz TV are not synonymous. Brazil has 60 Hz AC and uses PAL-M which is 60 Hz TV. AC=TV even in these odd cases.

Old CRTs couldn't possibly clock their flyback to anything but mains.

Hmm, afaik the framerates were chosen to be equal to the AC freq so that there are no glitches in the image. Do those countries have converters or something in the TVs, or did they watch jumpy image?

Fluorescent lighting, assuming it's not starting to fail, flickers at 120 Hz because each half cycle lights it up equally (+ or - doesn't matter). Incandescent also has 120 Hz flicker but the valleys are almost as bright as the peaks (slow response) so it's essentially imperceptible.

Cheap LEDs like some holiday minilights are rectified so they'll flicker at 60 Hz and I can't stand them.

Still the nicest displays I've ever used.

I am amazed that I never gave myself a hernia trying to lug a 21" monstrosity of a CRT to LAN parties

I bought an aluminum PC case and was quite happy with myself because it was much lighter. It weighed about 5kg instead of 15kg of normal metal ones.

15 years later it is still the case I use today, even though I am thinking about replacing it. Doesn't get much carrying today though.

It didn't even occur to me that this would need to be explained. Up next we should talk about why it was bad to leave VCRs paused for long periods of time.

Some kids call 3.5" floppies "save icons" because they've never seen them in any other context

That’s what I call them and I was born in 89...

The icons or the physical item?

Why was that bad?

It isn’t about tension. In order to display a paused image, the head must continuously rotate and scan that section of the tape. You can literally overheat and wear the tape out in that spot because there is a spinning piece of metal against it. Only specialized VCRs such as high end professional/broadcast or security recorders have something like a framebuffer.

I remember being told as a child that it "wears out the tape," but I'm going to guess it's specifically because the same section of tape stays wrapped around the capstan (the metal cylinder it loops around to be read) when it would normally be passing through. Keeping the same section of tape under tension for a prolonged period presumably weakens or risks distorting it.

It was worse than that. The head drum continued to spin throughout the entire duration of the pause, rubbing against the film at high speed. That's because the VCR didn't have any "memory" to hold the entire frame¹, so the lines of the frame had to be read from the tape over and over again.

¹ It was actually an interlaced field, not a frame, but that too much nitpicking.

So kinda like riding a clutch... ok maybe not that bad.

More like a burnout vs launch control, with infinite tread and it's the road you really care about.

I believe because the tape will stay under tension

I visited a TV shop about 5 years ago and some of the TV's up on display had the demo image burned in. So it's probably still a problem.

From what I have heard this is a problem with OLED panels.

I frequently use apps with "night" theme (black background, white UI controls). You know how Android apps have "back" button on the top-left corner, right?

There is also a navbar (back/home/recent buttons). In my case it's a white-ish rectangle that's almost always present on screen. By the time Samsung added an option to hide it, the damage was already done.

I have them both burnt in on my screen. I first noticed them after merely 1.5 years of using the phone.

OLED burn in is a 100% real thing.

Make an image of the back button, revert the color, and make your phone display it when you sleep. You will burn the other pixels and won't see the pattern anymore !

Doesn't this level of "burn in" mean that these oled screens will simply burn-out with use rather quickly?

I've been using OLED for a long time now, and never had this OLED burn in - including one particular phone (Ativ S, so Samsung S3 screen) that was in use by me for years and then used as a navigation system by my mother until the battery perished. However, someone I know had a phone (I believe the Samsung S8) nearly constantly playing videos with full brightness, and there it did show red streaks over the screen. I wonder what kind of usage triggers it.

It does not seem to be a permanent thing though in OLEDs, after some normal usage it recovers perhaps.

I have an early OLED TV that I burned in (left it on for some reason while I was asleep, displaying YouTube). A few years later there is no longer any evidence of the burn-in; it was very apparent at first, but went away quickly with normal use.

The people I know who use waze a lot (30+ min drive to work every day) have the notify icon (bottom right) clearly burned into their OLED phone screens.

As unread this comment on a white background on my phone (Note 8) I can see the burned-in remnants of the keyboard.

LCD can definitely have burn in

My Honor Play phone has this problem if the screen is higher than 50% brightness. It's very bad.

I'm not usually an early adopter but I was the first guy at my LAN party to bring an LCD monitor. It was smaller and looked worse than everyone's CRTs and had terrible ghosting, but everyone was fascinated by it and could tell it was the future.

I've still yet to see an LCD that performs as well as those CRTs, though.

I finally threw out my $1500 Sony Trinitron 27" high resolution CRT this year.

It worked fine, felt like a huge waste of money. But it weighed over 100 pounds!

Too bad that you threw out. Those Trinitrons are still sort after for retro gaming. You could of sold it or given it away.

I had one (it was either cheap or free from someone who wanted to get rid of it years ago) and I loved that it was my first TV with HDMI input at a time when HDTVs were out of my price range.

I had a small apartment so my desk/office area was a corner of the living room and I could run an HDMI cable over to use it as a secondary monitor for watching stuff on the computer. Even the fact that it would display 1080i was a huge jump from my previous bargain bin TV.

It was the days of Windows Media Center and it was before cable companies got rid of Clear QAM channels so I found that I could just take the shared cable in my 3-apartment house and hook up to a cheap Hauppauge card for tuner, guide, and DVR. Add a cheap USB IR receiver/remote and it was like having the "good" cable with the bells and whistles (but with a better interface and for free).

Eventually got an HDTV when prices came down and income went up, but a few years ago when a girl I knew was looking for a CRT to set up a retro gaming station for her young daughter, I donated all 111 lbs. of it gladly. That thing is probably still going.

"Could of?"

You missed "sort after".

We're both just as bad as each other, the meaning is discernible.

I once spent over $2k on a second-hand 21" CRT at an IT auction. Took two of us carrying it up/down stairs because I was worried about one of us slipping if solo. Needed a corner desk to fit the thing. I remember having 2-3 CRT screens pre-2000 and the desk required filled the room.

I would have bought it.