The Cathode Ray Tube site | Hacker News Reader

The Cathode Ray Tube site

crtsite.com

84 pointsjoebig18 comments

Beautifully old-school Web in so many ways. Besides the obvious (the layout, the "Sign the Guestbook" link) it is the whole "love" displayed by the site.

Kids, this is what the original web was like. Dedicated (maybe obsessive) site creators that (by hand) put together a site as a tribute to their passion—perhaps hoping to find other like-minded souls out there.

No ads. Wild, I know.

Love it! That's what I've been trying to do with my site: https://yesteryearforever.xyz/

I wish there was a way to find these sites more easily... I know they're out there. I miss the original idea of The World Wide Web from my childhood :/

(Set up a web ring, ha ha.)

Last week a couple of colleagues and I opened an old VGA CRT monitor to try to fix the broken front control buttons. One of my colleagues started his career as a TV repair technician, so he knows how to do it safely, but even then running a CRT without the case is scary as hell.

Anyway, the more I learn about CRTs, the more magical they seem to me. It's incredible what very smart engineers were able to accomplish decades ago with only analog technology!

How feasible is it to make a crt from parts? I find crt's fascinating learn best by doing- I at least want to demonstrate horizontal and vertical sweeps. But I've never seen a DIY CRT kit before.

This person scraped phosphor out of a broken fluorescent tube and made several experimental CRTs: https://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/crt/crt6.htm

From the site: "The cathode ray tubes that I am describing here are crude and they are relatively easy to make at home. They are in fact, much easier to build than most technically minded people would ever imagine."

> How feasible is it to make a crt from parts? [...] I've never seen a DIY CRT kit before.

The closest thing that springs to mind: A friend of mine once drilled a hole into an empty Vodka bottle, stuck two wires in it (one at each end), a hose adapter for a vacuum pump, "sealed" the whole thing with a hot glue gun and hooked it up to several scavenged microwave oven transformers in series. Yes, the output was rectified and capacitors were also involved.

Here are some pictures:

https://chaos.social/@itsyndikat/107846783094589995

IIRC what he wanted to do was plasma etching.

I suppose rearranging the electrodes (using a piece of sheet metal with a hole in it; both fed through the neck of the bottle) and wrapping the sides of the bottle with 4 strips of aluminium foil could get you a beam and some crude deflection control. Not sure tough what you would coat the end of the bottle with, but I guess vacuum coating would be applicable.

If that sounds absolutely insane to you, I'd wholeheartedly agree.

At least to my ears, trying to build a CRT from first principles, combined with learning-by-doing and learning-EE-from-youtube-tutorials, sounds like a fast path to end up either dead or in a permanent care facility. Not exactly something I'd hand out in beginner-friendly kit form.

The parts for making neon signs are not as uncommon and it would be kind of an introductory approach to building the skill necessary for more complex electron tubes.

In some ways it's never been easier to get all the equipment you will need. But if you're wanting to make ones even half as good as the ones on this page, you'd probably want to become a skilled glassblower and outfit a lab that looks something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA

this site is oozing with early 2000s charm - love it

i also like how they use a through-hole transistor as a scale for their miniature CRTs section

be sure to check out another more modern labor of love for CRTs: crtdatabase.com

Is it strange that this isn't the first time I've been on this site? It's got pretty great info, and I used to work a lot with vacuum tubes...

As someone who's pre-18, without the nostalgia bias, I couldn't find the website any uglier, but the guestbook part... That was cute.

It's ugly because you're not using a CRT to view it.

It's not supposed to look like that.

I dont know about CRT as I dont have any, but in my screen looks ugly. How would a CRT screen make it look any better?

It's just a reference to how CRT-era games look better on CRT as the devs were working with CRTs in mind and taking advantage of their way of rendering images[1]. I don't think there is actually a noticeable difference for the website itself, CRT performs a sort of interpolation which is great for old games that accounted for it, but for content that is already high-enough in resolution there is not any improvement

[1]https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-a...

It's a joke, a meme response to "games looked so bad back then" types of comments made about games built during the CRT era and played on modern "perfect pixel", so to say, monitors.

https://www.datagubbe.se/crt/

Also, yeah. The site was ugly, you're not missing or misunderstanding anything. It's pure nostalgia to those who experienced the web back then, a reminder of a simpler, more ideal time in the internet's life.

Go ahead and make a more beautiful webpage using as little code as this page uses, and performs just as well even on slow dial-up connections.

Who's talking about performance? It looks bad by today's standard, and that's okay. Not everything ages gracefully.

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