Today's Marginal Revolution blog linked to the essay below about plasma screens, PLATO, and such. Yes, I used PLATO.

But the newly released plasma screen wasn’t alone in the market for electronic displays. The plasma screen had originally been conceived as an alternative to CRT screens and the bulky and expensive external memory they required. But memory technology wasn’t standing still either: in the late 1960s, as Illinois researchers were building plasma screen prototypes, researchers at IBM developed DRAM, a type of computer memory that stored data using transistors and capacitors. Computer memory was soon being pulled along by Moore’s Law, getting smaller, faster, and cheaper with every generation, and before long the memory requirement for CRT screens was a minor concern.

Plasma screens did have other advantages, beyond the way their physical properties enabled a kind of “memory.” Unlike a CRT, which required a bulky glass tube, a plasma display could be made extremely thin. And plasma screens could potentially be much more rugged than CRTs, which had fiddly and easily disrupted electron guns.

But plasma screens also had drawbacks: they were very power hungry compared to CRTs, weren’t as bright, and were far more expensive. And while Illinois researchers tested a color plasma screen in the late 1960s, it would be many years before a color plasma screen robust enough to be commercialized was developed.

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-plasma-screen?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=104058&post_id=219319302&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=3o9&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email