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Comment by minkeymaniac | Hacker News Reader

Yes.. try moving that 36 inch Sony Trinitron from the car inside the house.. weighs 200 pounds+ IIRC....you need at least 2 strong people

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I remember the Sun monitors (21" I think) were about 80 lbs. I've read that part of that was a metal frame to hold all of the wires in front of the screen.

They were fun monitors - we had a lab full of them, they would degauss on startup, and the degausser would induct into the monitor next to it (and a little bit into the monitor after that).

Right. Bought two out of a University lab and lived in an apartment six stories high with only stairs. Moved out those monitors even and they were more difficult to get down than the couch...

Don't let me get started about fixed frequency, X11 modeline guessing (wrong of course) and needing a second monitor to even get back to the original config.

The weight from a CRT is mostly about the amount of glass required to keep the atmosphere out, as it's essentially a vacuum bottle with better marketing. On that 21" display, you've got about 6000 pounds of force trying to push the face inward, not to mention the sides, neck, etc.

Yeah, these monitors were a bit heavier than most consumer 21" monitors at the time. We also got Viewsonic monitors for PCs, which were lighter. At the time, I had assumed the additional weight was from extra shielding, but I later read that some of the weight difference was a metal frame holding the wires. The trinitron had a bunch of vertical wires instead of a grid of holes on the front - If I remember right, they'd shimmer a little if you smacked the side of the monitor with your hand.

It's possible they also had more glass than typical for a 21" monitor, I don't recall if they were any flatter than the Viewsonics or not.

BWAAAA

I wish I still had one around, just to degauss it occasionally.

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