Clearing out the loft eves spaces of all the accumulated junk
Second trip today consisted of 8 PC keyboards. The very very large skip for small electrical appliances had just been emptied. Never have I been quite so satisfied as to see 576 lettered keytops all zinging and bouncing around as they landed in the bottom from a height of 10 feet!
The sadness? My old 19 inch Taxan Ergovision high resolution PC CRT went on to the TV pile. I was so proud of that, cost a staggering sum of 600 quid new. Such a monster and so heavy but staggering quality.
So far the score in the bin is
Three PC's, 6 screens, 4 inkjet printers, one laser printer, 8 keyboards, three tele's, a tape drive, three video recorders, one cd player, two getto blasters, two radios, 20 hard disks (ranging in size from 10 mb to 2gb) 10 cd drives.
phew!
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>> The sadness? My old 19 inch Taxan Ergovision high resolution PC CRT went on to
>> the TV pile. I was so proud of that, cost a staggering sum of 600
>> quid new. Such a monster and so heavy but staggering quality.
I dusted down my old 17" CRT Belinea screen from the loft when I brought a server home from work to set up last year. ISTRC I paid about £250 for it at the time, which was middle of the road for a 17" screen. I too was absolutely staggered at the image quality. Smoother, more natural colour than the LCD stuff, and so much less harsh on the eyes.
Apart from a brief whiff of burning dust, it worked fine for the day. Then I placed carefully back to rest in the loft afterwards.
Couldn't believe the weight of it!!
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My last CRT for a computer was a 17" Iiyama Vision Master Pro with a Diamondtron tube (so a Trinitron essentially) which I think I used to run at least 100Hz refresh and it was far better than you'd get on most LCDs at the time and even today.
Ironically it died the day before I got a new PC which came with a 19" LCD. I recall the Iiyama cost about £350 when new!
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I had an Amstrad PCW.
The integrated CRT on that was rubbish.
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>> I had an Amstrad PCW.
Was that an original green screen Amstrad Iffy? I had one of those too. It was a bit better than a typewriter but incredibly feeble and backward compared to a proper PC. And the screen was real crap.
But the printer, a 9-pin dot matrix thingy of surpassing crudity, which required tractor paper with holes down the edges and sheets that had to be torn apart along the dotted lines, did a wonderful rough 'economy' version. The non-economy version looked like ordinary typing more or less, but the economy looked like poor mediaeval printing during an ink shortage. Fabulous. I still miss it although these modern printers can do anything if you can afford the ink.
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...Was that an original green screen Amstrad Iffy...
That's the one, mine was the cheapest 256 model, although still about £400 I think.
It was a giant leap forward for me to be able to edit on screen before printing.
Crude piece of kit, as you say, but reliable.
I had micro-perforated paper for really posh jobs.
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>> It was a giant leap forward for me to be able to edit on screen before printing.
That was indeed the main advantage - no lines of xes or stuff scribbled in that typesetters and the like used to garble or get wrong or omit. The other major advantage was not having to mess about with carbon paper.
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ISTR recall that my 8512 had a daisy wheel printer with a cassette ribbon?
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I'm reading this on a "Hansol 710A" 17" CRT now. Always have done :)
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I had one of them, was is 128 or 256k memory. You could double that, but the 'expansion pack' consisted of 8 chips you had to solder on to the 'motherboard'
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My brother in law had a Vision Master Pro. Stunning image quality, but I remember it had the two thin horizontal lines across the screen which were annoying as hell once you spotted them. Something to do with the damping/stabilising wires used by the aperture grille technology in the Trinitron tube, IIRC.
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It was good fun to slap the side of a trinitron tube, the wires all danced giving the image a shimmering quality till they settled down.
never liked them myself, always think a high quality shadow mask CRT was better.
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>> the wires all danced giving the image a shimmering quality till they settled down.
This one has a "degauss" function which does that, quite violently if you haven't done it for a while :)
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My last CRT was a 17" LG Studio. Paid around £130 for it new in 2001! Kept it for a couple of years then bought my first TFT, a 17" Benq.
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>>17" CRT Belinea screen
Thats what im using !!!!!
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Zero, you should always keep your junk in the loft!
That way, when your neighbour accidentally sets fire to your house and everything in your loft is burnt, you can claim for replacements from your insurance.
Allegedly....
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Recently took a Microwave combi oven to the tip. Similar scenario, the electrical skip had just been replaced with an empty one. Over the side it went, helped with a bit of gravity to the bottom of the skip. Clang, bang, wallop!! Microwave oven still intact, despite the impact being right on one corner. Never even made a dent, apart from probably to the bottom of the skip.
If I did that with its replacement, I suspect it would smash to smithereens.
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Back years ago the tube in my 28" CRT TV (Dolby Surround Sound) TV was failing. Cost to fix was uneconomical so it went to the landfill. And it was sadly landfill because there was no recycling skip for TVs back in 2003 around here.
Replacement CRT TV was only £350 and also was Dolby Digital etc.... and nobody wanted that when fully working so that was recycled recently.
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The amount of stuff we throw away.A couple of lads I knew picked up discarded furniture in Rotterdam.Transported in a container cleaned up and polished.They made a good living selling it in the UK.
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They didn't have that warehouse down by the river Hull did they Dutchie? I remember going there and seeing mountains of second hand Dutch furniture in 1991/2 when I was working in Hull.
(Good quiz question BTW - "what river is Hull on?" Most people say the Humber. The clue to the correct answer is in the full name, Kingston-upon-Hull).
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Strange satisfaction - tinged with sadness. - DP
