On this date 88 years ago (1935), William Coolidge obtained a patent for the cathode ray tube, a critical ingredient of TV and other electronic applications. I knew CRTs primarily from the big-box televisions at home in my childhood, but I worked with oscilloscopes in physics class laboratories. Early personal computers, including the IBM AT desktops pictured on my tie, used cathode ray tube displays, first (around 1981) for monochrome texts and later (after 1984) for full color displays. The development of liquid crystal displays in the 1990s produced the slim, compact monitors suitable for laptops, and the incredible versatility of LCD and other technologies has made cathode ray tube displays essentially obsolete across the electronics industry.
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