Essential Guide to Computing: The Story of Information Technology, The

Monitor Technologies

The monitors in most desktop computers today are the same cathode ray tubes (CRTs) that had their first use in televisions. CRTs, which use a set of three electron guns that scan back and forth to illuminate color phosphors on the front of the screen, provide a good image, but they are heavy, bulky, and use lots of power. The big advantage of CRTs is price; several generations of manufacturing improvements have created monitors of consistently high quality at very advanced levels of production efficiency. The fact that televisions use essentially the same technology is an important contributor to this success. But CRTs have lots of weaknesses, and competition is coming, beginning with portable machines.

Laptop and other small ...