Re:DOS Days – Laptop Displays
by neilv on Thursday November 20, 2025 @01:09PM
(#45995671)
The coolest use of a gas plasma display I saw in person was at my teenage software engineering internship.
We had the coolest engineering workstation computers, Sun and almost everything else, with the huge CRTs... but strangely cooler, in a way, was the sysadmin's Ethernet diagnostics device.
IIRC, it was built atop a rebadged Toshiba laptop with orange gas plasma display, and included a glowing bar visual display for network traffic (packets? collisions?), with corresponding geiger counter sound effects.
A modern IPS LCD or OLED just wouldn't pair as nicely with the sound. (Analog gauges or Nixie tubes would work, though.)
We had the coolest engineering workstation computers, Sun and almost everything else, with the huge CRTs... but strangely cooler, in a way, was the sysadmin's Ethernet diagnostics device.
IIRC, it was built atop a rebadged Toshiba laptop with orange gas plasma display, and included a glowing bar visual display for network traffic (packets? collisions?), with corresponding geiger counter sound effects.
A modern IPS LCD or OLED just wouldn't pair as nicely with the sound. (Analog gauges or Nixie tubes would work, though.)