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.