Quick count at ON7DQ … CRT 4 - LCD 10
So LCD wins with 4 TV’s, 4 PC monitors and 2 scopes.
CRT comes second with two 14" TV’s, a Hameg 312-8 scope and … an IBM 5151 monitor, which is still operational with an original IBM XT computer.
The RTC-card battery must be gone, it says 1 jan 1980 on top of the menu screen … but the pic was taken today, hi.
Last CRT TV went to dump a few years ago after one of the guns (red I think) went. Took me and my brother in law to lift it into the back of a van - too big to fit in an average hatchback! Thing was so heavy I put my back out!
Was going to say there are no CRTs left in the house but saw someone mentioned magic eyes. Still have one or two old valve receivers with those and I think you can say they are mini-CRTs.
Amazed me when I saw all the old colour CRT TVs piled up at the dump. When I was a lad, most folk couldn’t afford to buy a TV (BW or colour) and had to rent them. Skip forward a couple decades and you literally can’t give them away!
I hope everybody is doing a bit of scavenging prior to the big trip to the tip: http://buratto.eng.br/py2wm/balun/Balun_with_free_ferrite.pdf
A ferrite core good for a kW or more is hard to pass up…
John
Oh Lordy… does this one count?
I also have about 5 or 6 old CP/M luggables!
And of course I have a CRT based scope.
And if it’s a rear-projection TV, make sure you scavenge the Fresnel lens, either for optical comms experiments or for the ability to melt metal using just the power of the sun (store the lens carefully, standard legal disclaimer, etc.)
Oh great, here comes a new twist to this thread… is it “fres-nel” or “fra-nel” lens?
Don’t toss those LCD monitors/tv’s! Open them up and you’ll likely find a bad capacitor in the power supply. I fixed the monitor I’m using now for less than a US Dollar 2 years ago… And I’m running a 55" Samsung in the living room that I fixed with a used power supply board for less than $25.00 - and I got that TV FREE!!!
Look for bulging caps (google for images,) and on bigger TV’s, google the power supply part number and you can find working pulls cheap!
The “s” will be silent if pronounced as a french word. I suggest that’s why some say “frez nell” and others “fraynel” or “frenell”.
The name is from the inventor French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel according to Wikipedia, which also offers clues to pronounciation. “Fraynell” is the anglicised version they offer.
But I guess the fact that the inventor was French will be ignored by many…
Au revoir et bonne chance, (staying on topic as French was in the topic title!)
73 Andrew VK1DA/VK2UH
Well, I still have one 27" CRT TV in the house. We’ve had it for a long
time, I forget what year it was new. It’s an RCA and still going strong.
Everything else in the house has been converted to LCD. There’s still
a spare CRT computer monitor out in the shed for drastic emergencies!
AND it’s a VGA monochrome rescued from work about 25 years ago!
73,
John, K6YK
The last CRT in my house was a Tektronix 2225 oscilloscope; still within specs when I eBayed it last year, it probably still has a few good years left in it.
This is my last CRT monitor.
When I had been in the loft getting Christmas decorations down I thought I would see if my 30 year old Amiga 1500 still worked.
There is something about playing original 16bit games on the original hardware 
Christmas like its 1990 
Dual floppy’s that is pretty high spec!
No CRT’s anymore either in my house and my last tubed amplifier (an old Drake L4B) got sold earlier in the year. (I loved that old Drake and wished I still had it with the warm glow of the big tubes).
Ariel NY4G
Philips 28" + Nicam Stereo circa 1995 ? (£1.5K at the time), still going strong with Philips digital interface box and Scart - circa 2008? Still a great picture. Though struggles a bit against 48" HD 3D LCD and 7.1 surround-around - circa 2010.
Mainly watch TV in shack with Humux HDD Player & Recorder and Smart interface + 36" ? Samsung screen, Samsung DVD, 25w/channel outboard audio amp - all HDMI.
Now what’s on the telly tonight?
(;>J
Bringing and old thread back to life…
I have just shutdown the last “spinning rust” hard disks in the computers here. That doesn’t mean there are no traditional hard disks, just that they are not used everyday. I have a fair number of true hard disks in external USB caddies for back up purposes.
The last machine was a Buffalo NAS (networked attached storage) which had a RAID array of 2x 2TB PATA 3.5in disks. I’d become concerned that it had been on since December 2011 and those disks were getting very, very old with effectively 95000 hours continuous use. They’re 7200rpm disks so that is around 41 billion revolutions each! I’m impressed by that number TBH but the Buffalo did come with proper server class drives not domestic ones, hell it was £400 in 2011. I looked into buying new disks for it but PATA disks, especially big ones are unobtanium now. You can find some used ones but replacing them with used ones seemed somewhat futile. I looked into replacing them with SATA disks and some SATA<>PATA adapters but then they wouldn’t fit in the case properly. Then I thought well put some 2.5in disks in as they would fit but flop about a bit.
That’s when I stopped and thought about the issue. The reason for RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) is because spinning hard disks fail with mechanical issues. With the RAID setup if one drive fails, you can swap it out for something the same size and rebuild the array from the other disk. SSDs fail differently so as long as you back it up you don’t need set up RAID SSDs, just one is enough. I’ve spent the evenings over the last week playing “music disks”. All the files from the old NAS are now on the big SSD in the Linux machine and that is backed up to a USB3 disk.
So this morning after many checks that everything has been moved the NAS was shutdown. You flip the power switch to OFF and the software ensures everything is safe and it powers itself off after a few minutes. And the silence is deafening 
No wee fan whirring and 2 3.5in disks no longer spinning.
What is also interesting is looking at SSD life. I was worried I’d bought the wrong type of SSD when I upgraded the windows PC. Its SSD is a 1TB unit with only a 300TB total write endurance. It’s been in use since May 2019 and in that time it’s seen only 11.5TBW. That’s with Windows never stopping and being idle but bashing the disk all the time. That suggests it should last another 300/11.5 x 2.25years = 58.5 years. Unless we see amazing advances in medical technology I wont be here to worry about that!
I’ve had a spinning hard disk in computers for the last 38years since a 12MB 5.25in full height ST-506 device in a Sage IV 68000 based machine in 1984. To not have the background whirring somewhere in the shack is very, very strange.
Good to see progress in the FMF shack. I still have 2 CRT oscilloscopes here and unlikely to replace them.
Thanks for your expert view on the current state of storage.
Regards
David
G0EVV
Very nice was my Sony Trinitron but I recycled it in 2014 (bought in 1989) with some regret. It was the best CRT but too deep and loud! The “progress” must go on.
I have a collection of hundreds of antique tube radios and about twenty antique tube TVs, including one-inchers by Sinclair, Sony, Panasonic & Millen (panel-mount scope), plus old CRT monitors by Commodore and Leading Edge in green, amber & colour screens. A third of the radios have 6E5 eye tubes (CRT). All the TVs need digital/analog converters, of which I have a stack. Replacing electrolytic caps is a full-time job.
The best CRT story involves the complex San Francisco transit system, whose control room is full of CRT equipment and runs entirely on floppies. I guess if you use 150 year-old cable cars, you might as well use hopelessly out of date controls.
Elliott, K6EL
