CRT Damage and Replacement - Wyse WY-520 Terminal 

You should always write "PAINT INSIDE" on fragile things, instead of "FRAGILE". Broken glass is easy to sweep up. Spilled paint can mean hours of getting yelled at.

The mistake was writing "fragile" on the box, which translates to "kick harder" in cargo handler.

It's crazy to think that finding a spare tube for the exact model you have is one of the most holy of holy grails. Totally understand. You have a rare video indeed.

'crtl-[' is ESC. I use it in Vim on a touchbar Macbook that didn't have a real ESC key either.

I remember my local public library had a lot of these terminals (in the mid to late 90s) for people to do library database searches. Some of the keyboards had been used so much that you could almost see a reflection off some of the keys. Brings back some good memories.

When Shelby was holding the CRT one handed. I was like: This better not turn into a comedy sketch.

I knew that CRT was dead the moment I saw that box. I'm an ebay reseller and "normal" people just do not know how to properly pack. So much goes into it, compliance, void fill, box resizing etc.

When I got my first job at a pizza shop in 2016, they were still using these terminals for order taking. This brings back memories!

Your 8086 license plate has inspired me to get an Illinois plate that says 80486 that I can display for a few months this year. I just couldn't help myself!

I was once told that writing "FRAGILE" on it doesn't make any difference because delivery companies usually just don't care. So unless you hire a special delivery service (and pay the extra coin) you can write on it all you want it doesn't change the handling procedure at all.

He's dead, Jim. Damnit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a CRT repairman.

It's so cool that these can be just as useful today as they were in 1978. Looking into x windows terminals lately.

It's not always obvious, but always make sure the dag is grounded. The coating on the back of the CRT is conductive and must be grounded. It will cause all kinds of problems if it is not grounded. Some have what looks like a useless spring, but it is a ground. This one was very obvious, the clip on the lower left of the screen was touching the dag. It acts like a great big capacitor.

I felt it might be worth mentioning that after VDC stopped shipping out replacement CRTs, I was able to acquire one (not amber unfortunately, I think they no longer have any amber stock) from their subsidiary, Lexel Imaging Systems. I get the sense that inventory is extremely limited at this point, but it's probably still worth checking with them if you are in need.

Even packing a CRT in the original packing and box may not save it from damage. I moved and took a DEC VT-550 with me. Packed it in the original packing foam face down. Original box too. Still got damaged by the movers. The tube is Ok, but the case got broken. The switch is no more and the pedestal part doesn't work either. Never have tried to see if it's fixable or not. I still have it too.

It is the law. You must play the Portal Outro on this screen. This was a Triumph. I'm making a note here.

Funny story, when i got my 9 inch monochrome green monitor, it came as a bare tube + control electronics (both brand new, zero hours) as it was made for repairing a C&C machine display. i now have it living in a plexiglass box on top of my workbench and it's plugged into a win 7 machine that i use for flashing eeproms and other workbench type stuff that won't run on modern hardware. as for how the tube was packed... factory box, with 3x folded bubble wrap on the face, and two foam sponge blocks securing the neck. tube arrived intact. the yoke was in the electronics box, so i got to have fun "building" my new green monitor and aligning the yoke. i think i have a video of it on my channel.

One of my first purchases with my new credit card was a 21" Sun MicroSystems CRT off eBay, which was over 20 years ago when I was big into SPARCstations and BSD operating systems. The entire screen was in pieces when it finally arrived and was heartbroken. I think the limit I had back then was like $300 or $500 and that purchase well used up half my limit. Super bummed and I never bought another CRT I couldn't pick up locally.

"You can use it to get real work done." - LOL that's what we all did before GUIs. I remember having to mess around with TERM settings in UNIX to get different VT, WYSE and other data terminals to work consistently with the GIS software I was installing. the TERM variable is used by apps to figure out how to display

I loved amber screen terminals. The color was so soothing.

Well, thanks to his sacrifice we had a rather special video. Honor to you, old crt.

Super cool repair! Always happy to hear old equipment getting new life!

LOL at the escape sequence with the escape pod!

i love how easy you can remove the cover that gives you access to the crt, kinda cool. Terminals are a thing i really love but i can't really get because of space, some day though! the amber display is just so good.

Ctrl+[ (left square bracket) functions as an Esc key btw. Had that one ingrained in my muscle memory because a surprising number of the terminals I used back in my school days lacked a dedicated Esc key.

Those terminals are excellent. At university in the 90s we had them in the library, used them to search the library database. The amber screens were always very clear. It was sad when they moved over to Windows PCs with a terminal window, then a fully GUI based front end, just not the same.

Since I follow many RU-vid channels, I feel confident to say: you explain and demonstrate things among the best of all the channels I know.

Loved this video, the stars aligned there for you to get that terminal working. A couple of months ago I had a Tektronix scope (2235) arrive with the crt broken. I knew it as soon as it arrived, you could hear the "tinkles of doom" when moving the box. That was sad. Messy too, bits of glass in all the packaging. Tektronix themselves recommend at least 3 inches of foam on all sides, it's in the service manuals.

As noted by others, Ctrl-[ should give you an escape key. Note that F-keys send a sequence of keys often starting with an Escape. So hitting an F key in insert mode in Vim should get you back to the prompt. But the characters after the Escape could do unexpected things in Vim. The thing with backspace vs. delete key and which one works where to erase left is a bugaboo that I've had to deal with for over 50 years.

When I was in the dorms I had a WYSE 60 in amber at the foot of my bed. I would use it to connect to my main FreeBSD machine at my desk via getty just as you did above. I would use it for email (pine) and to kick off mpg123 to play an mp3 or several without leaving the bed. I had it on a 25' 25 pin cable. I miss that little machine. The flyback failed on it and I was not in the know of how to fix it or, had the resources to afford fixing it. It got recycled. I wish I had kept that boat anchor, it could be alive today.

It has been a few decades since I used to repair these so this video brings back some memories 🙂

The ES manual is for the MPR 1990:10 compliant version, so it should be fine.

The entire time I was thinking "Telnet Starwars would be awesome on this....." Then you did it and put a big smile on my face haha

Thank you.

Vector yokes aren't the same as raster yokes. Their horizontal and vertical windings have equal impedances, whereas raster yokes have more windings and thus higher impedances on the horizontal axis. The tubes themselves are often the same, though. One relatively common way to keep an old vector arcade machine going is to pull a CRT from an old television and reuse the yoke from the old monitor. As long as the deflection angles are the same, it's pretty much a drop-in swap.

I had no freaking clue metal jesus rocks had brother who was into retro tech. Instantly subbed for the vibes alone. Im along for the ride.

This reminds me of a recent experience with a new-old-stock Esprit 400 Terminal. I got lucky and found an ebay listing in the original shipping box with styrofoam packing. I would not have shipped it otherwise. It also has an amber screen and just works with any machine I throw at it. I've used with with a DEC Microvax as well as modern Linux systems. My favorite features are the split screen 'window' mode and PS2 keyboard with (what appear to be) Cherry black switches.

you are an absolute gigachad and just earned a subscriber

I knew most of this in isolation, but this is one of the best explainers ive ever seen, TBH. As an owner of many CRTs, i feel enlightened.

cool, great video !!!

The starwars blinkenlights demo being called "streaming starwars" cracked me up.

Trip down memory lane... used to use similar Wyse terminals to these in the late 1980s/ early 1990s. Used to edit termcap definitions to get better emulation ;-) Thinking that VT220 definition is your best bet :-) Good luck

Very cool. I just switched to Linux and the terminal is a bit intimidating. This video does bring me back to the old days when I was in school and those terminals was the only way your could look up certain books in the school and public library. Man I feel old!

I would have to change that green LED for an orange one, it would send me mad if I left it like that, I would have to cover it up.

Honestly, removing the tube and shipping it separately seems to just be a much safer way to ship a CRT device. Facing the yoke upwards with plenty of empty space around it and making the box rigid enough to support whatever's being stacked on top of it is enough to protect it from all but the most spitefully abusive worker. Keeping it inside the monitor with the heavy stuff attached to it means it could snap from just being jostled around too much. And we all know what a pothole-riddled mess some of America's roads are.

Used to support these "back in the day" in college computer labs. I still like the DEC VT220s much better including the keyboard. Ours Wyse terminals were white on back/black on white.

I used these in a retail job until about 2020, they started to blow capacitors but had been chugging away for decades.

Thomas Electronics makes CRTs for legacy equipment. The yoke also has weight because of the ferrite cores in it.

Trivia: In order to improve the vacuum in a CRT, after air has been sucked out and the CRT sealed, a getter pellet or disk inside is flashed through inductive heating. The getter evaporates and binds other gas molecules before sticking to the inner surfaces of the CRT.

About the magnetization problem on CRTs, just to add this: Most 'modern' CRTs have a de-Gauss function :)

I was thinking control [ would have worked to send “escape”, I’m guessing you tried that

First tech job we had multiple call centers full of Wyze 60 and later the cheaper Wyze 50 terminals. I wish I had a couple now.

for the escape key: in vi, vim, and probably other programs that use the same bindings, you can also use Ctrl + [ (open square bracket) for escape though a properly mapped escape key is probably preferable as far as any other programs go

Agetty has three terminal modes to modify the Baud and TTY settings. One for displaying the Login prompt, another when signing in with your password, and the third when Bash is launched.

Was it planned that you talk about escape sequences during Star Wars' droid escape sequence? That was brilliant. Also, I love how we humans look at an older thing like this screen and go "Wow! It does black, brown, and - get this - a *slightly dimmer brown*!" when we have a modern screen right next to it that does - to put it mildly - a few colors more than just the three.

Ages ago, I'd shipped something that ended up breaking. While tyring to get them to insure it, I was basically told the best way to secure items for shipping. Foam and bubble wrap for shock impact. Then put the entire thing in a hard sided cooler. Why? It's plastic and rigid foam. You're basically armoring it up. It's also just about the only way a shipper will go, "Wow yeah it's our fault."

I still love serial terminals. I have 3 including a genuine DEC VT220. when I started as an undergraduate on my Computing Science degree we used dumb terminals connected to a VAX-11/780 through terminal concentrators that didn't handle backspace correctly during login meaning that if you made a mistake with your username or password you couldn't correct it and had to enter the pair again. To this day (40 years later!) I still pause and have to think if I mistype whilst logging in to one of my Linux machines! 😆. One of my terminals is hooked to a PiDP-11 and another is on my homebred 6809 machine.

An excellent example of why we need convincing flat panel rebuild kits for dead CRT's

Check for a control flow setting. If enabled, you can reliably use higher baud rates.

2nd job, 1st day, my boss takes me to a store room, opens the door, points to about 30 new Wyse terminals, and says could you work your way around the museum installing these and connect them to the Prime mini. And I did.

Excellent video and additional to your collection! Terminals are crazy expensive, and people sell them with keyboard separately. BTW, couldn't you add delays to inputs and outputs like 10msec? I did that with my pc to connect to my RC2014 to get higher speeds.

I think the inplosion band can get magnetised, but a degauser will fix

ALWAYS ship them face down. This happens with old radios too. The speaker is attached to the front of it, a lot of old radios have 1 or 2 large transformers on them, plus a thick steel cage. People drop the box and the inertia just rips the speaker right off of the wood or in the case of a crt, all that mass of the yoke can neck the CRT. Also, they should have double the padding you think and then the box put into a bigger box again completely surrounded with padding/foam/popcorn. Given that was shipped to tech tangents, they should have opened the monitor and taken the yoke off. You cannot do that with everyone, but you can with tech tangents or a guy who wants to restore it.

Mess around with Mplayer and the caca video codec. probably my favorite smart terminal test is running a King of the Hill episode through it and seeing if the shapes are remotely recognizable.

I've been pretty fortunate with the CRTs I had shipped to me from ebay over the years. I need to figure out why my sweet little NCR 9 inch CRT is so dim. I miss using the Reynolds and Reynolds terminals we used to have at work.

I think I like the amber ones better, they look like they’d be easier on the eyes.

Ace Ventura: "We're going downtown!" FYI, those dielectric supports are glass, they're often a unique color, and jewelry makers will pay good money for those because nobody knows exactly what blend of glass they are. It seems the tube manufacturers kinda melted down all kinds of leftover cullet to make the supports.

31:12 - When he connects a terminal to the TVA's mainframe.

Gosh, this reminds me of the mint ibm 8513 i had shipped, that got necked in transit.

As soon as I saw the screen, my heart sank. I knew it was over for that poor tube.

Interesting failure mode. I'm very surprise the device is not completely destroyed due to implosion. Nice fix!

The fact that back cover just pops off exposing high voltage is kind of scary. Definitely wouldn't pass todays standards.

Bummer about that, but great move making a shit situation into something very bloody useful! Great work man!😅

VT 52 brings back memories

This would go great with the Plexus P/20 that Adrian's working on in his Digital Basement.

I wonder how they were delivering TVs and monitors back in the day to the shops and factories. Was there a high rate of damaged tubes or there was some kind of now lost institutional knowledge how to handle fragile stuff?

There’s no beeping for this terminal when you press a key. I wonder why. I just loved the way it did that with the Televideo 950.

You should be able to use VT420 mode which can support graphics with customisable fonts.

If you ship something fragile, do NOT mark it as "Fragile". Someone did a study a while ago to find out which carriers were the best and they learned any package they sent marked "fragile" almost always ended up in the worst shape. Why? Because people are assholes.

Ready for some data general content 😃

Seeing the thumbnail of this video gave me a mini heart attack, getting a flashback to when I was about 10 years old. I was given an old non-working CRT monitor by my dad to take apart as I loved looking at the inside of electronics. All went well until I was a little too rough taking the neck board off the CRT, breaking the neck while air violently wooshed in. That, in combination with being able to see inside the CRT from the front and specifically looking at the black area where the neck is/was, scared the living hell out of me. It was probably a B/W CRT as it looked almost identical like in this video. I could not sleep in my bedroom until I asked my parents to remove the TV and monitor from my room and I never had any CRT in my bedroom from there on. That left such a mental scar that, to this date, I am still not comfortable handling CRT monitors or TVs despite this happened nearly 20 years ago. I still own the little bedroom TV which still works since it was barely used after that happened. I'm glad that I kept it because now I like using it occasionally for retro gaming, but setting it up is still somewhat of a mental challenge. It's amazing and scary at the same time that watching this video takes me back to the exact time and place where I was when this happened. I still wonder why this left such a permanent 'scar' though.

FWIW there is ONE company in the US (I don't recall their name off hand, I assume they still exist anyway) who repair at least monochrome CRTs, as in they actually cut the tubes open re-coat the dag and such, replace the electron guns then reassemble and re-evacuate the tube. I think there was a video on Fran Blanche's channel about them. Probably horrifically expensive though...

F11 is marked (ESC) on DEC keyboards. Also, Ctrl-[ == Esc

Doing the PC God's work! Amen!

The three strips holding the electron gun components in place are made of glass.

An example of why we need convincing flat panel rebuild kits for dead crts

termcap and terminfo provide slightly different solutions to terminal control, although I think terminfo has effectively replaced termcap. Neither is particularly difficult to write if you have the manual for the terminal (or for the standard the terminal is following).

Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.

Hey Shelby, love your videos, I know you said how you're also in AZ, but had a question if you've ever pursued the warehouse of stuff at Emerald Computers here in AZ, they have.... Quite the assortment of unique things that you may find interesting, I know I do everytime I've visited, anyhoo, will enjoy your video and hope you have a great day!!

@TechTangents ncurses includes several wy520 terminfo files, although sometimes the uncommon ones are packaged separately (e.g. ncurses-term on Debian) and/or stored in a different location (e.g. Debian puts the ncurses-term ones in /usr/share/terminfo but the base ones in /lib). 'toe -a | grep ^wy520' should list the descriptions for any that ncurses can find installed.

Just use the control key and left square bracket. That will send the same character to the terminal as the physical Esc key.

@1:23 ghost face

It's like you'd think the shipping companies are in cahoots with display makers to try and make us buy more monitors 🤔

Wow more than one vertical axis!

that will buff out and a little jb weld will fix anything😊

I spend most of my time using a terminal. CLI tools tend to be faster.

Amber is sooooo nice!!!

Question: other than getting them up and running, what can you do with a terminal today? Thnx.

so does this terminal work with your DECtalk?

Well since there is no exact part replacement for the crt, would there be any possibility of adapting a similar crt made by another company ?