Egregoros

Wild that literally nobody makes these things anymore.

20 years ago they were everywhere, $100.

Now there's no factories left. All of the high voltage electronics are kind of bespoke and there aren't really supply chains for them anymore, but you COULD make them again.

The real kicker is the tube, the color mask and phosphor coating is a disaster. And what's more, the machines that made them are now archaic. Even if you were able to get one, keeping it maintained and working properly is a skill unto itself. Generally production engineers will always build new lines using only current era (CNC) machines for which the spare parts and knowhow are widely available.

This is an important little lesson that technological capabilities are not to be taken for granted. 20 years is long enough for a technology to really basically just vanish and once it's gone, you would need to go through a whole new R&D process if you ever wanted to bring it back.

@cjd @charliebrownau CRT is actually relatively "uncomplicated" technology. Looked up the luminophores that were used there, and they are basic too - doped zinc sulphide and yttria. The method for synthesis of these is usually Pecchini method, which is basically mixing few (commercially available) precursors in crucible and firing it in owen (I call it "idiot-proof", since I tend to work with much more sophisticated chemistry). The electronics part would be more tricky in my opinion, but maybe it's just because that's not my area of expertise.

@cjd @charliebrownau A skilled electrical engineer shouldn't have much problem getting it done. The most helpful part is that all the knowledge (papers and patents) you need to recreate this technology are available on internet or your average university library, hence it's not that much of a lost technology. Recreating Apollo program would be very tough though, as this is neither something "small" nor relatively uncomplicated, and a lot of technical aspects and know-how was never really publicized and people who had it are gone now. I would say that modern semiconductor industry and low-level programming are at the highest risk of becoming "lost". The first one is pretty much exclusive to few companies in the world and the level of know-how and technical culture required appears unsurmountable. The second is like a language, that less and less people speak, while the accumulating debt makes whole software industry technically bankrupt - in few years either nothing will work at all and we will "live with it", or we will re-write all the things from scratch, undoing last 30 years.

a CRT display is so well documented and understood that the average radio technician from down south of rio grande can repair them within a day from almost any failure short of the motherboard breaking in half, when that happens the repair may take a week of fine soldering all the broken traces, not to mention epoxing the board together, i can attest from first hand experience to that one as back in highschool i had to help a classmate epoxy and solder his CRT board together after helping in accidentally breaking it...

the real engineering challenges are not on the circuitry of any given device, the circuitry of a microwave oven and the circuitry of an electrocardiogram machine are only "really different" in the quality of their building, otherwise the internal components will boil down to voltage transformer, resistors, capacitors, inductors, relays, diodes, LED display components, input switches and ICs, and the only things from that list that can vary wildly are the ICs, which outside of the display driver ICs and the ECG application specific ICs all other ones are either manufactured by texas instruments in guangzhou or are a modified clone from some chinese plant in chengdu, the real engineering challenge are the components that have input/output interaction with the external world, for a microwave oven that is the magnetron while for an ECG machine those components are the "electrode sensors" connected onto the patient, those are a challenge as the manufacturers have managed to build a pseudo-monopoly on the knowledge of how to manufacture and repair those components in a similar manner to the application specific ICs, if the magnetron on your microwave or the non generic made in china ICs on an ECG machine die you have no option but to buy replacements outright, even refurbishing is gatekept by the manufacturer.

@EdBoatConnoisseur @niobleoum @cjd @charliebrownau one thing is repairing/servicing them and another one is manufacturing them. The supply chains, economies of scale and know-how that made CRT manufacturing make sense simply aren't there anymore.

But can confirm these TVs are still being repaired by normal TV technicians instead of redditor amateurs, here and perhaps in the whole third world, them being cheap as fuck and the like. Just like how we still service rod brake roadster bicycles and Volkswagen beetles.