"Nine inch Blurbs" made me laugh a lot more than it should have. LOL Including such hits as "Oddware you like an Animal", "CRT I Can Never Have", "The Hand That Games" and "The Wood Grain Drug"

@LGR

2 жыл бұрын

😄

@nerfytheclown

2 жыл бұрын

Noice.

@chrisjamesr77

2 жыл бұрын

Head Like a Blerb

@chrisjamesr77

2 жыл бұрын

@@WellBeSerious12 LOL that rules!

@SmeddyTooBestChannel

2 жыл бұрын

Nine Inch Blerb's famous front man Clint Reznor

9" monochrome VGA CRTs used to be on the ePOS cash registers (computerised tills) of my local convenience stores in the 2000s, and they were running Windows NT 4.0 at 640x480 and it was so cute seeing the little mouse pointer and _ □X buttons :P The pharmacy had a 10" colour version!

@kbhasi

2 жыл бұрын

Cool! This reminds me of when some shop I went to in the mid 2000s that had a POS system which ran Windows 2000, and the custom POS software didn't hide the Windows UI, so I could still see the taskbar end title bar when I looked down into their screen mounted underneath a window in the counter.

@RWL2012

2 жыл бұрын

:)

@user-eq2fp6jw4g

2 жыл бұрын

Y can remember these type of monitos were used with registers.

@BlackEpyon

2 жыл бұрын

I've known what a POS is for years now, but my mind always drifts in a different direction.

Nine Inch Blerbs: Clint's Nine Inch Nails cover band.

@HGAMES69

2 жыл бұрын

Head like a Blarb

@sonicaids

2 жыл бұрын

lmao i scrolled down and was about to make a similar comment

@mikewifak

2 жыл бұрын

Does each video have a halo number now?

@Veezyjung

2 жыл бұрын

@@HGAMES69 I blerbed myself today...

@ficklampa

2 жыл бұрын

That’s what she said

This was the first monitor I've bought in the 90's because I've been so broke that couldn't afford anything better. Ran it with "hand me down" 386 PC

@mgjk

2 жыл бұрын

I used an IBM 12" paperwhite VGA for a few years on my first PC in the early 90s and loved it. The total loss of "dot pitch" made for very crisp text. Modern displays blow it away of course, but for the time there were advantages. My machine was a 286 built from junk I put together from the back of the local computer paper. I was *pooor*.

@alexandredevert4935

2 жыл бұрын

Hey, me too ! In the mid 90's, with the little money I had, I bought an IBM PS/2 from an administration together with a monochrome monitor. The pixels were sharper than any color CRT I could see around. Playing UFO X-COM on it made the game extra-creepy, especially the night missions.

That has to be one of the cutest CRTs i have ever seen in my life!!! :)) Tiny little thing.

@lethal_guitar

2 жыл бұрын

Finally a CRT that's easy to carry around 😄

That cute and adorable monitor cries out for an equally cute and adorable computer to connect to. Maybe an Amstrad 4386sx or a modern ITX mini kind of thing.

@joseislanio8910

2 жыл бұрын

Or a thin client, for a suitable size.

@squirlmy

2 жыл бұрын

Any time-appropriate computer would suffer a cuteness deficit in comparison to the first Macs, which had 9" monochrome screens. I think it could be an interesting second monitor for aesthetic, if not practical, reasons.

@infamousJohn_thedoc

2 жыл бұрын

What is a 4386?

@Venlaw

2 жыл бұрын

Tiny 3D printed woodgrain PC.

@cyningstan

2 жыл бұрын

@@infamousJohn_thedoc It was a small format 386SX-based desktop PC released by Amstrad in 1991. Came with a little 10" VGA colour monitor that matched the little case nicely.

There was a modification you could do to a monochrome VGA monitor display for a more complete display, it involved connecting the red and blue lines to the green through resistors, that way it would display something for all colors, not just green.

@K-o-R

2 жыл бұрын

Being monochrome means it's running RGB, or rather just G, but doing that modification makes it more like luminance?

@brianleeper5737

2 жыл бұрын

@@K-o-R Yes, depending on the selection of your resistors you will get different luminance values for the red/green/blue signals. Probably the best setup would be to feed the red/green/blue signals into 10k potentiometer for each color, with one side of the pot connected to the color signal from the VGA card, and the other side connected to ground. And the wipers of all the pots connected together to feed the "green" (really now all colors combined) signal to the VGA monitor. Then you could adjust the pots to get the grayscale you like.

@squirlmy

2 жыл бұрын

@@brianleeper5737 that sounds a little like the Apple II video hack to display colors on TVs of the period. I imagine your hack would sound like a step backwards to a lot of engineers.

@brianleeper5737

2 жыл бұрын

@@squirlmy I'd hope anyone who calls themselves an "engineer" would be a little smarter than to think this a hack.

@owenvogelgesang7314

2 жыл бұрын

You could follow Rec.601 or Rec.709 luminance coefficients

Got a similar one, same size but in color. The seller told me it was, as you said, from a POS terminal. I find it amusing knowing that in the 90's, some bored cashier at the local supermarket probably watched this monitor for hours, while drifting away in her mind thinking about things. And now, it's in my hands, with me watching it instead, displaying all different games and such instead of just some words and numbers, and makes me happy.

@squirlmy

2 жыл бұрын

a cashier that "drifts away from her mind" is a soon fired cashier. Angry and even homicidal fantasies is more like it.

@hellion9547

2 жыл бұрын

@@squirlmy That depends whether or not there are customers around...

Nine inches of goodness !

@HGAMES69

2 жыл бұрын

Nine inches of nails

@kylosalvesen

2 жыл бұрын

that's what she said

@bdwilcox

2 жыл бұрын

It's actually a ten inch screen. CRTs would always be measured diagonally across their actual tube then a half-inch bezel would cover up one inch of the screen. So 17 inch CRTs measured diagonally would actually be 16 inches once they were in their bezel. 14 inch CRTs would measure 13 inches. And 10 inch CRTs would measure 9 inches. So this is a 10 inch CRT.

I had a very similar one of these back in the day... picked up at a bank auction, and used it my server at LAN parties for years :)

Love the monochrome. Makes the games definitely a bit creepier.

Watching your videos always brings me back to my childhood. 90's were the days

That looks almost identical to the POS monitors at my wife's old job, they were using them well into the 2010s until they finally updated to modern flat panels.

@mattx5499

2 жыл бұрын

I started working in the tax office back in 2006 and I had terminal with b&w monitor but it was running only one app for entering various tax data from printed documents. After about a year or two I got a Windows XP PC with MS Office and color CRT so I could print lists of documents instead writing them by hand which was pain in the ass. When I left the office in 2015 we had Win10 Lenovo all-in-one PCs which were amazing compared to all the junk we had before.

I'm just really impressed at how well you got Duke 3D running on a 486 lol

We used these at my local Asheville K-Mart when I worked there when I was about 16-17. They used them until they closed around 2015. I remember messing with the contrast dial.

When you know the layout of a game well enough to play it while missing half of the display/graphics... now that's pretty epic!

A cash register monitor Always thought they looked cute :D

I used to play Doom 1 on a 386 with no soundcard and with a mono VGA monitor (but slightly bigger). It was awsome.

Oh God i used to have black and white 14 " CRT VGA monitor around '93-'94, it was a real pain trying to play some games cause You really couldn't see a thing. This just made me remember the suffering.

Those new Roland speakers would look nice next to the monitor on top of the PC case :) Wow, Epic Pinball looks like when the teached went and photocopied a color pictures from a book and handed out but the photocopy is just a black mess because the photocopier was black and white. I don't know how those work, I'd assume just as Clint explained with the 3 channels mixed into 1 as a grayscale but those photocopies never looked that good. 9:38 - at this moment I remembered that there's this screen filter effect in Doom when you pick up the invincibility, it looks kinda just like that :D This room is full of green so the visibility is good.

@SuperSmashDolls

2 жыл бұрын

Getting a proper greyscale signal from VGA requires encoding at least the Y part of a YUV signal, which is obviously slightly more money than just driving the electron gun directly from the green line. Especially when people using the monitor will just program around the lack of any blue or red functionality and you can save a few cents of precious margin.

@andersernest4540

2 жыл бұрын

Photocopies aren't really greyscale, which is why they look so poor: they squash everything into either black or white. You could use a halftone screen to produce false greyscale but most schools did (still do) not use one. Halftone reproduction is used in most printing applications (including newspapers and colour printing) but that is going too deep for a KZread comment.

@Programentalist

2 жыл бұрын

@@andersernest4540 Is halftone just print/copytalk for dithering?

@andersernest4540

2 жыл бұрын

@@Programentalist Pretty much, it's the same basic idea. The difference is that halftone dots are on an exact grid and their size changes whereas in dithering the dots are usually all identical but they are not necessarily on a grid. Halftone is easier to achieve IRL but dithering is easier in software, and normally looks better.

@Programentalist

2 жыл бұрын

@@andersernest4540 Ah ok, thanks!

My first VGA monitor had 64 shades of gray, and made Wolfenstein playable and my life complete. :) I switched out to my CGA when I would be on a BBS though. Those ANSI colors were a must!

What impresses me it's that it's not just plain VGA. The label on the back says SVGA!

God it's my dream to get a CRT of that size, monochrome or not.

@SadMonti

2 жыл бұрын

You should dream bigger!

@Brooklyn727

2 жыл бұрын

You can buy a brand new one on eBay for $110, and it will deliver to your door. Pretty achievable dream.

@billybollockhead5628

2 жыл бұрын

We used to have loads in office, attached to servers mainly - where you need a screen, but only once in a blue moon so no point splashing out.

@RWL2012

2 жыл бұрын

the colour versions are 10" I think haha

@owllymannstein7113

2 жыл бұрын

Why? Although if you're really interested the original Apple IIc monochrome monitor was even smaller.

I used to have one that was maybe 11-13”, that came with a Smith-Corona word processor. The clarity was excellent.

Oh the memories. Reminds me of one I used for a long time, think it was a Compaq 10" monochrome vga that came (to me) with a Compaq DeskPro 286. Small mono displays always looked so crisp.

Used to have those on FedEx shipping terminals with an equally small keyboard. Loved it.

That duke impression of yours is awesome

A long time ago I converted such a Monitor (Not that exct type) to a GrayScale monitor by removing the original plug, Get a fullpinned VGA plug, get 3 100R Resistors, soldered one end of each resistor to the Red, Green, and Blue positive, Linked the other ends of those resistors together, and linked that node to the video input line of the cable. Then i soldered the Common to the Green Return. Worked like a charm. :-)

Clint, any of us, whatever: This looks like it could be a cool wee monitor to use for something completely different from what it was doing all these years! Got crazy nice plans for it. Monitor: NOPE. NO WAY JOSÉ

up until 10 years ago or so a lot of our discount supermarkets still had 7/9" CRTs in the tills. Some of the stores had them a bit longer because they had yet to be renovated, but by now they've all been replaced by cute little LCDs

Amended Doom System Requirements: Light amplification visor required for monochrome VDUs.

Wow...I remember when it was mind blowing how much bigger 17" monitors were than the 14" and 15" I had previously.

@eDoc2020

2 жыл бұрын

The other day I was working on my antique 10" TV and when switching to a "modern" 12" set from 1982 the picture just looked gigantic.

@evensgrey

2 жыл бұрын

@@seanwfindley Now you can get a 4k TV the size of a tabletop for that kind of money. In act, I have a kitchen table that's smaller than a 4k TV you can get for that kind of money.

I do remember seeing similar small VGA monochrome displays being used in PoS systems. Usually there were two monitors, one pointing towards the cashier and other pointing towards the customer. The largest supermarket chain in my country used old DOS based PoS systems which originally came with similar small CRTs (IIRC, they were Beetle systems from Wincor Nixdorf) IIRC all the way until 2010s (!), or even for longer, can't recall exactly. They did replace old CRTs monitors with LCDs though in later years.

8 seconds in, and I'm already convinced that 9-inch Blerbs should be tech-themed 9-inch Nails parody band

Wow I actually remember these or at least something similar. I worked for a small company circa 1999 that had 4 or 5 of these hooked up outside the server room. Their only purpose was monitoring network status. Cool.

Good old CRTs

Displaying only green signals want the case for all monochrome/paperwhite VGA monitors; in fact, I've never seen one that displays only green until this video. As mentioned, the monitor was probably manufactured as cheaply as possible specifically for point-of-sale systems. I'm not a huge fan of monochrome VGA monitors, but there is a certain something special about the PS/2 Model 25's built in paperwhite monitor. Would make a good blurb someday if you have one in your inventory.

Beautiful looking monitor!

I just picked up a 9" Samsung amber composite monitor at a vintage electronics gathering last week, not as cool as VGA but glad to have such a cute monitor for testing things!

I’ve got one of them from 1996. I used to look after a chain of petrol stations back in the day and I’ve still managed to hang on to one. My one displays orange text though. They used to use them on the POS systems as LGR says.

That was EXACTLY my experience as a kid with one similar to this. It was a little bigger but with the same controls. Playing Doom with it was a different experience. Of course the similarity between red / blue and black was an issue, however the eerie experience of 256 shades of gray Doom and mainly Doom II was very different to playing it latter with a Samsung SyncMaster 3 SVGA (that was my upgrade to the monochrome monitor). I hope someday I'll see a review in LGR or LGR Blerbs of a SyncMaster CRT similar to the AccuSync one.

when I moved out for college in the late 90s I started to put together my own systems and VGA Colour Monitors where still very pricy at least by college student standards so the first VGA monitors I had where monochrome like this with the black and white. I first played DOOM on this kinda screen and while alot of it worked.. when you press Tab for the map it was just black. when I finally got a colour monitor I was just blown away by the difference. But even this monochrome VGA was a huge upgrade from CGA which is all I had before hand.

Idk why but that ruler comment made me laugh so hard. Been a rough work week so thanks for the laugh and interesting vid!

Remember seeing such monitors used with vintage CNC machines and that sort.

That was my dad(and mine) first monitor from our first Pc, right back in 1996. It was a 486 66 with 8 mb of ram and 1gb hard drive. Entire Pc used It costed like three minimal wages at the time here in Brazil.

Reminds me of the monitor I used at my first job at my dads office when I was 12. It was essentially connected to a server and you could access files, there was no computer attached.

Very nice monitor. Looks new.

God these monitors always look amazing in low light.

That did my mind in for a while, couldn't quite work out if the monitor is tiny, or Clint has suddenly grown to giant proportions :)

I used to install these in server racks back in the day. We didn't want to waste any precious rack space so we needed a monitor that was as small as possible. I seem to remember that they were quite hard to get hold of. You'd end up with a rack full of servers and then one of these on the top.

Happy little monitor!

My God Clint, it is beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. I love this old tech you seem to just pull out of your proverbial. I wish the tech gods would give us similar awesome stuff today. Though I guess android tablets are pretty cool

cannot resist that a cool looking lamp over there. ..

I had one as a second monitor decades go :) I mainly used it as a test kit as it was easier to transport

very cool little monitor you've got there.

I remember the Thrifts episode it was featured in. Nice memory trip!

It was about my 1st vga monitor... got it from an accountancy company - they had decided they didn't need color to input figures, so it was cheaper, and it fell into my lap when it was made redundant later int time. As I was a broke student, the princely price of just zero was absolutely perfect when they asked if I was interested in picking it up. It finally gave up the ghosts a couple of years later, but I liked the crispiness while it lasted.

@eDoc2020

2 жыл бұрын

It makes sense an accounting company would want one of these. I believe negative values are often shown in red on financial spreadsheets, so with this monitor they would only see the good numbers!

Those monitors are great for mini itx mods for old macs, they fit perfectly in Macintosh classic case

I have the same. Excellent picture quality. Works very well for Atari ST to display hires monochrome, One nly needs to build the adapter from the Atari special connector to VGA.

This does look familiar. I have seen a lot of these at ancient point of sale systems. I remember finding them interesting with their ancient computers and often found myself looking at them.

Love seeing Paper White VGA monitors.

This monitor is going to look great in the upcoming VisiCalc techtales video! Can't wait!

I used one of these as my daily driver monitor back in 2002. I was cheap and it was my first screen with a resolution higher than 640x480.

That reminds me of my first VGA monitor. It was VGA paperwhite though so white, black, & 254 shades of gray.

Some early (S)VGA cards had color/monochrome switch that should in theory mix RGB values. Even in VGA specs it was specified that it could display 256 colors or 64 shades of gray on monochrome displays.

I love monochrome CRTs. The crisp definition always blows me away. And sometimes color is distracting.

My first introduction to the ... uh ... internet ... was on a monochrome VGA display, so I have some very specific nostalgia for this vibe.

Crazy not seeing this with massive burn in at the grocery store.

I could not afford color monitor back in '93 when I got my first PC (308 DX 40 MHz like yours in this video I guess) so I had to go VGA monochrome. Thanks for the bad memories

I have one myself, really cool monitor. Mine was for a POS system but surprisingly has no screen burn.

I remember hundreds of these being on eBay back in the early 2000s, always advertised for point of sale terminals

This reminds me, in the Windows Me days, I first experimented with multi-monitor, with a 12" b/w monitor on a S3 Virge PCI card. Those Virge cards were of the few that would work on early Windows 32 as a secondary video card, and they were very cheap second hand at the end of the 90s, as was the monitor.

Cool little crt

Nine Inch Blurbs is my favorite industrial metal band.

We had this exact monitor in our Studio C Chuck E Cheese computer. Always had a nice crisp picture till it popped. Great looking display!

(1:30) You just reminded me of how I have a point of sale monitor that is a 10.4" colour SVGA monitor from some kind of IBM "SurePOS" system.

That's a neat little monitor

@BilisNegra

2 жыл бұрын

Look like one, but technically leaves a lot to be desired...

@JohnSmith-xq1pz

2 жыл бұрын

@@BilisNegra Well to be fair as LGR stated it's meant for a Point of Sale system not a daily driver monitor.

@BilisNegra

2 жыл бұрын

@@JohnSmith-xq1pz Of course, I perfectly got it. But then, it's simply fit for its purpose. No coolness to it. Before you watch the video, you'd wonder: can I use this as a general purpose monitor wich would mean many possible interesting projects/uses? and then you get the answer: no, not really.

I had - as my first VGA a 12-13" mono VGA monitor. After I got a 15" color one, I parked it until it was used at my first server (AMD 586@133) with Red Hat Linux. First I used it with dos/windows 3.11 and by the time I installed Win95, I already had the color one. My guess is that it came from some bank in Germany when they upgraded theirs hardware in late 90s; at the time a lot of computing hardware was brought from Germany. Legend said that they were picked up at the garbage bins were they were disposed by banks or offices that upgraded. With it I bought a nice IBM PS/2 model 30 (a 286 ISA). Edit: I remember that some programs had a option to display on VGA Mono displays (NC for example had a palette option for that). Also I think to see the option of VGA Mono on some BIOS (maybe detected by the VGA card?). Mine displayed 14 shades of gray + white squares at 5:26 on checkit. Yours is very...black and white. Check some settings. Also, when booted with monochrome monitor, thee PC will display mono image even when change the monitor with a color one, until is restarted. Check to see the difference in image quality.

Mono VGA normally reads off the Green color signal. Some older ISA VGA cards have dip switches to set the mode properly so that red and blue do not get dropped. I have an ATI VGA Wonder video card that works perfect on monitors like this as it properly detects the mono VGA monitor and renders RGB into shades of grey. It will also render EGA to anything plugged into the TTL connector too. Pretty much all other VGA cards I've used with a mono VGA monitor would drop the red and blue signals. I remember reading years ago that there were two different mono VGA standards, one was IBM, and I'm not sure what the other was. The IBM standard seems to drop red and blue while the other standard would render RGB to shades of grey.

I used on of those on a Point of Sale system when I had a cashier job in Highschool.

You said we'll be seeing those Roland speakers in your videos. You weren't lying.

Monochrome CRTs are my favourite thing

I used to own one of these briefly and I believe they were called a "page white VGA". When I first built my first PC, I got one of these used, not knowing it was monochrome, and quickly reselling it. POS = Point of Sale, funny, I was thinking of an alternate meaning. ;)

I had a Compaq Portable size VGA Mono monitor back in the early 1990s, it got taken to bits and put inside a case of a clone of the Compaq Portable which also received a 386sx motherboard since it used standard baby AT format boards. The VGA standard was supposed to push the overall Luminance signal onto the Green line when a monochrome CRT was detected, but not very many people actually used VGA Mono, so it was frequently not implemented in clone cards. I think the ATi VGA Wonder does it correctly, you might want to try that. I tracked down a card that handled VGA Mono properly for that portable build, there was a list floating around of what cards worked.

What is on the sticker on the bottom at 2:26? I remember seeing the backs and sides of these monitors in banks and stores years ago. Thanks for showing what the display is like. It reminds me of the Atari SM125 monitor, only 75% of the size.

Green contributes most to the brightness of any display so just displaying greens is a good compromise, also for business you don't want people to be playing games so limiting it to keep solitaire off off them is probably a plus.

@CptJistuce

2 жыл бұрын

if I recall, the original VGA adapters had a jumper to tell them a monochrome monitor was attached. This would probably work a lot better in such a configuration.

aah, i love small crts. need more. just got a really nice 8” PVM a month ago though, so i guess im good for a while unless i see anything cheap or free

once has a larger monochrome with a picture like this, turned out the Red and Blue were present in the cable and not connected inside the db15 I soldered them with the 2 grounds toi and the monitor became a real black and white monitor

I had a few of these years ago, and used them on an old POS system back in the day.

Nice! Save our CRTs!

It looks like shrunken head Beetlejuice sitting on that giant 486 case!

This monitor looks like a perfect companion to the old IBM PS/2 models which only supported MCGA video modes.

@sebastian19745

2 жыл бұрын

In late 90s I got a IBM PS/2 model 30 with a similar monitor (12 or 13" I think). It had dos and Windows 3.11 on it. Later I used the monitor on a Red Hat Linux server machine (586 )

Reminds me of the auto parts store. Ask for a certain item and they look it up using a computer with a monitor just like this.

I used to have a monochrome vga monitor, when you turn up the brightness you could see the difference between the colours. It was a affordable alternative to the color vga monitors

@idimidodjimi6760

2 жыл бұрын

And not a good one, except for typing text on white background. I did also , and for that reason only I was unhappy for some time with my PC experience.

@dickjansen8461

2 жыл бұрын

@@idimidodjimi6760 it was a step up from cga but still a budget solution, however it worked fine with things like DTP and printers were also mostly black and White, so it didn't matter.

Analysis, its adorable

I had one of these for a while in ‘91 when my ega monitor died and I borrowed a vga card and mono monitor for a month.

With such small monitor you can hook up some retro consoles. Worth to try even it's black and white.

It's adorable!

My brain filled in dooms text as red because it expected the text to be red. I had to focus to make the text black.

It might have also been for industrial applications where there was a constraint to a 9 inch CRT. These were a not uncommon size in the old Hercules monochrome days. Oh, and it shouldn't drop colors. VGA has a monochrome spec, which on very old cards is set by jumper. I had an ISA VGA card with a monochrome jumper setting, and it worked great with my 13 inch monochrome VGA monitor that I has about 25 years ago.