The death of the CRT

For those baby boomers the CRT was the route to freedom, it meant entertainment and a vista into unseen worlds through Television, it meant untold riches through massive industrialisation of the white collar work place with the computer terminal. Mostly though, it meant big heavy screens on the desktop and in the corner of your main living room.

Well now the CRT (that’s cathode ray tube to our physics readers) has finally been dispatched to the great office heaven in the sky, along with the Rolodex and the electric pencil sharpener.

The great trend setter and innovator, Apple Computer has finally signed the death knell and announced the end of life of its last CRT based computer, the eMac, replacing it with an LCD iMac.

Be sure that where Apple leads, others will follow – quickly.

In our homes we’ve replaced Televisions with Plasma or LCD home cinema systems, in the office most of our communication is done from our LCD laptop computer (increasingly on the go and wirelessly).

So wither the CRT? Well yes – but it’ll still take 3-4 years to sound the complete death knell to the CRT in many parts of the world.

So our challenge to our readers is to calculate the amount of space saving and power consumption released when the world goes ‘flat panel’. This correspondent remembers being told by the services manager at JP Morgan in London in the mid nineties that the cost of giving each trader an extravagantly priced fifteen inch LCD display was justified not on the cost (three to four times that of a CRT at the time) but of savings in Power cables, desk space (London being the highest per square foot) and heating requirements for air conditioning.

The world has moved on fast … yet again – it all seems to have happened in the blink of an eye, another disjoint in the world of technology. We’d be interested to hear from you if you can reckon the global savings in Space and energy that the LCD uptake has led to in offices and homes around the world.