Burn in was easy to achieve
We had a lot of burned in monitors at one place I worked. These were mainly due to running the same software for extended periods. eg. the monitor for the access control system.
A Washington-based coder named Bryan Braun has recreated one of the curiosities of the early PC age: animated screensavers featuring flying toasters. And the resurrection has been effected using cascading style sheets. For the young or forgetful, the late eighties and early 90s were the time of the animated screensaver. The …
Perhaps the author is also one of "the young or forgetful" (perhaps the former?), but I've had a lot of monitors with screen burn. The top left corner would have a C:> burnt in, and POS terminals would literally show the same grid when you turned them off. Of course, flying toasters won't run on TTL, but when we got the more recent colour CRTs, then burn in became very much less common - though still possible.
I was going to say the same thing. Every CRT I've ever seen that was hooked up to a DOS system back in the day had burn in, and a healthy chunk of the ones that were hooked up to Windows 3.x did to. The worst I've seen was a 60 inch big screen set up for public information with that annoying "It is now safe to turn off your computer" notice that Windows 95.
The burn in on my one of old monitors showed me exactly where I was the night I fell asleep playing Nethack.
Yup in my first proper IT job we had several monitors in the server room that had a bad case of burn in. In particular the old green screen monitor connected to our MS Mail server was completely useless unless you wanted to look at the main menu. The monitors connected to our Netware servers weren't much better.
I could never understand why they were on in the first place though, why not leave them off to save power & prevent burn in and only turn them on when needed?
My favourite example of burn-in was the early Reuters terminals. These had an alert box that was always on display but when there were no alerts to be displayed would display the REUTERS dotted logo. Thus the screens would display the company logo even when turned off.
(Very difficult to find a screen grab from that era but here's a BBC story that includes an image: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2775965.stm )
Exactly.
There was a brief period where CRTs were cheaper than hard drives, I used to use them for backups. Just leave your document open 48 hours then it was permanently stored on the screen.
In the end I found that storing CRTs in the basement was a very cost effective way to manage our backups, and was promoted for saving the company over a million dollars. My replacement was burning CRTs all the way up to 1998. Good times.
Exactly.
There was a brief period where CRTs were cheaper than hard drives, I used to use them for backups. Just leave your document open 48 hours then it was permanently stored on the screen.
In the end I found that storing CRTs in the basement was a very cost effective way to manage our backups, and was promoted for saving the company over a million dollars. My replacement was burning CRTs all the way up to 1998. Good times.
You're a couple weeks early for April 1.
I have trouble believing you'd do this rather than just printing the documents in question if you were going to go that route. Funny story though.
The dangers of burn-in.... :
http://www.blameitonthevoices.com/2009/12/free-tv-on-craigslist.html
... "screen burn" was a fact of life. It wasn't until the second generation VGA screens that it became something that wasn't exactly an issue.
The "screen burn problem" entered into "common knowledge" myth, and so-called "screen-savers" became a simple way to separate fools from their money roughly when Windows 3.0 appeared. Roughly at the same time, "Oh, look, how pretty!" became Apple's business model (Anyone but me remember Taligent & Pink? Talk about your brain on drugs ...)
The computer literate amongst us had been blanking the screen when not in use before Fidonet existed.
I still have my computer blank the screen after ten minutes of non-use. Not because of "burn in", but rather because nobody but my wife should be eyeballing my main computer screen (yes, she has the root password to all my systems).
"There must be a way to keep CPU and GPU load up during idle periods even in this day and age."
Back in the day (since we're all being nostalgic) that was catered for by 3D Pipes (which iirc was OpenGL) screensaver quite nicely. Not the best thing to have as your screensaver on a server (if you were unfortunate enough to have a windows box as some sort of a server).
Yep, seen it too. We have a couple of 5+ yo LCDs with the image of our machine controller software permanently etched into the screen--you can even read text. Not as bad as their CRT predecessors, which were burnt so badly you could even read the etched text with the power off and the screen dark.
Yep, used to help my old man with some kit where he worked, they had a couple of green sceens attached to 286s on a 386 Concurrent DOS network ( anyone remember Concurrent-DOS? ). Each one had the DOS DataEASE menu screen burned in, it used to stay there even after the power was pulled.
I have seen all the above burn-ins on terminals PC and Mac.
My favourite screen saver was the guiness one. Cove approaches monitor screen, looks at you, taps screen and nahh nahh diddle diddle nahh nahh.
Sheer and utter marketing and technical genius.
I also liked frightening the chaps by putting BSOD screen savers on critical machines.
During a job interview, I was asked to decipher one of those "fake screensaver" bluescreens, happened to be a faked cdrom drive issue in that particular case - of course, the guy was laughing when I tried to touch the power button ... I got the job but refused it, the position was not technically demanding enough for me ...
My first VGA monitor was really cheap. When i got home i noticed some writing on the screen, with some other ascii characters for decoration around it. It was a square repeating itself over and over down the screen with the fabled words(or rather similar):
"This screensaver has started to protect your screen from damage"
Brilliant, pure brilliant. I always regretted not 'acquiring' a copy in the days when it was current.
I think it was 'DownandnotOut' above that mentioned 3D Pipes. Does anyone remember the occasional joint that came up as a teapot in some versions ? I can remember spending hours watching for that bloody teapot !
Chris Cosgrove