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Comment by cgriswald | Hacker News Reader

In the 90s I was tasked with fixing our CEOs computer and entered his office to see the largest CRT I’ve ever seen in my life. (It was not a PVM-4300, though. This one was sat on a metal table.) The size of it was shocking. I was more shocked, however, to find out he used it at 640 x 480. I never saw him use it so maybe he played games on it… from the moon.

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The Sony FW900 was the peak of desktop CRT monitors, and it came out in 1999 so it or one of its rebadges might have been what you saw. That was much smaller than the PVM-4300 at 24" but with a much higher max resolution of 2304x1440@85hz, roughly what we'd now call 1440p, about eight years before the first 1080p LCDs arrived.

Those were still sought after well into the LCD era for their high resolution and incredible motion clarity, but I think LCDs getting "good enough" and the arrival of OLED monitors with near-zero response times has finally put them out to pasture as anything but a collectors item.

I remember in the mid ‘00s having a 19” that did 1600x1200 at (I think) 85 Hz. Damn thing was a tank, but I loved it. So crisp.

Was turned onto the the FW900 from hardforum years before LCD was available/reasonable

Now I have a FW900 sitting in a closet for decades because I can't lift it anymore

Also will never forget I was taking a walk in the woods years ago and in the middle of nowhere, no houses/apartments for miles, there was a FW900 just sitting there like someone must have thrown it out of an airplane but of course impossible as it was intact and inexplicable WTF (when got home made sure mine was still in the closet and had not somehow teleported itself)

We set up one of those widescreen Intergraph CRTs for a client way back then, I think the cost of that thing plus the workstation was easily more than I made in a year

Those Intergraphs were bigger than the FW900 at 28", although lower resolution at 2048x1152@80hz max, so I suppose YMMV which was better.

IBM was producing in Japan T221 monitor staring from 2001. It had 3840x2160 LCD screen.

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