Last week I made a post asking if I should buy an old vintage monitor.
Well, I went back to the recycled goods store this week and it was still there, so $30 later I have it, and it seems to just work*
There’s very little about this monitor on the internet, so I’m thinking of documenting as much as I can about it, especially as it’s Osborne branded so there could be some interesting history behind it.
* The power button is stuck on, and it does an occasional unsettling arc sound and the image slightly distorts for a millisecond. I believe the latter is fairly common among old CRTs but I don’t know much more than that.
Bruh this would have been the most bad-ass website on the internet in 1998.
The closest thing we had at the time was Craigslist missed connection.
We made do.
We had IRC and AIM but it just wasn’t the same.
We searched yahoo and lycos. We asked Jeeves. We had it all.
Until I get a nice computer to pair with it (that is, not my Linux server), this just felt right to do with it
my win11 (a necessity, not a choice) box at the office drives a 17in trinitron crt running at 1600x1200
Needs to be 3.11 skifree
My grandpa had a monitor like this - it came with a Osborne computer he bought in the mid 1990s. It was either a 486 or Pentium 1 (can’t remember) and came with an Osborne-customized version of Windows 3.1 along with some floppy disks and CDs with Osborne software on them.
He was still using that same computer, with the same OS, until he moved into a retirement home in the late 2010s. He only really used it for writing stuff in some old version of Word, and playing Italian card games (Scopa, Briscola, etc).
I’m not sure what happened to the computer since it was all gone the last time I visited his house after he passed away. I live in the USA but he was in Australia so it was hard for me to try and keep on top of things like that.
I imagine a lot of these went that way unfortunately, including this one. They were difficult to use on Windows 95 onwards as far as I’ve found due to the SVGA resolution being interlaced, making them more tempting to toss once the Osborne PC became obsolete.
It’s quite amazing he continued using it up to the 2010s, but I suppose when you have a completely offline system that already meets your needs, then it can’t really go obsolete.
It’s quite amazing he continued using it up to the 2010s
Yeah I’m surprised it lasted that long. He never used the internet or mobile phones and the Windows 3.1 PC was probably the only piece of modern-ish technology he used.
Bro you have to have the screenshot be showing the post showing the screenshot. Do you even internet?
It’s just SVGA; why wouldn’t it “just work?” It doesn’t appear to be weird or special in any particular way.
(Edit: other than being 240V/50Hz, which isn’t normal where I am but presumably is normal in OP’s country.)
Welllllllll… A couple points to mention are that it is SVGA but interlaced, so I’m doing a bit of messing with xrandr to get that working but otherwise it is happy doing 800x600 progressive
I also meant that I didn’t need to do any work to it - it has a couple minor issues as mentioned but didn’t have any major components that have failed (like the flyback for instance)
Also yes I’m based in Australia so 240v is standard here
That’s hot.
The power button is stuck on, and it does an occasional unsettling arc sound and the image slightly distorts for a millisecond. I believe the latter is fairly common among old CRTs but I don’t know much more than that.
Sounds like a degauss!
It’s relatively common for CRT screens degauss as they turn on, so it makes some sense that it’s still happening, even if the power button otherwise doesn’t work - the degauss must be triggered by a different internal mechanism than the one controlling the power
This monitor has no OSD or button to trigger a degauss. The coil will be wired directly to AC via a posistor, so it’s entirely passive and will only trigger again when the monitor cools down.
The distortion is caused by the high voltage arcing over, which droops and interrupts beam deflection for a moment. I wouldn’t want to run it this way for very long, because it can damage the flyback transformer over time (although the flyback could itself be arcing anyway).
Thanks for the heads up - it’ll stay as a very occasional use monitor until I either feel comfortable enough to look inside (after lots of research, given the voltages within) or find a friend experienced in CRTs. I really wouldn’t want to blow it up when it could’ve been prevented easily by maintaining it.
Ragebutt’s advice is good RE: maintenance. I would take the back off, make sure it’s discharged then clean around the anode cap and in general make sure there is not excessive dust/soot that could form a path for electrical discharge. Clean the anode with alcohol, apply a little dialectric grease to the cup and put everything back together. There is a decent chance that will help, just make sure not to wipe off the black paint on the tube - this is called “aquadag” and it is important to the operation of the monitor.
Butwhy.gif
The ultimate plan is to have a full retro setup, and I will piece it together as I come across more components that I think will fit.
The dream would be a PC from about 2000, running Win2k but dual booted with something old like Win3.11 and/or DOS, and period accurate (but still comfortable) peripherals, so keyboard, mouse, and speakers.
