LGR - Unboxing a New 1980s Amdek Monochrome Monitor 

*XT LAST I couldn't resist.

"After 10,000 years I'm free!!! It's time to Conquer Earrrrrth!"

Dunno. More appealing maybe but also a bit dark

Wouldn't they be lighter on the eyes as well?

Yellow is a less energizing wavelength, less energizing wavelengths are usually less straining, it is the reason why some computers have red text since it is less straining on the eyes. I know some people may say that red hurts their eyes, but the reality is that the eyes themselves are not strained as hard as green or blue, it is a placebo effect that makes them feel like red strains their eyes more.

It´s pure gold.

It's so sexy... AHHHH!!! New Vegas vibes!

I totally agree

I didn’t notice!!

It reminds me of those old Compaq Luggable monitors.

beat me to it

Dammit me as well XD

i would love to get my hands on a monitor like this!. Someone could build a custom os for the raspberry PI! ohboy i cant wait.

you played new vegas i thought no one played it anymore oh and good reference

I see you are a man of culture as well! ;)

lmao this comment is so cute

@@Featherogue "Only 15 years ago" I'm 15 and I've never felt so young

@@aidancommenting Lmao!!

Take your story time lies to reddit

Watches movie on projector: wHY CANt We JUst USE papeR

Real1Gaming I thoguht it was a toaster oven (no joke)

Real1Gaming initially thought it was an LGR Foods video

same. lol

YES. Thank you, I wasn't the only one who thought this was a microwave.

THANK YOU! I was thinking exactly the same, now I know it's not just me being weird!

White phosphorus? "New Amdek monitor - now shipped with a potential war crime!"

@@Pijawek I had a color 300 as well, at least thats what i think it was.

no....it was a color 3. I still have the box complete with the rma number i had when i had to send it in for service. Just looked at the box 2 minutes ago....LOL

Thanks, now you've got me wondering why someone would have to have erotic ASCII art open for so long it burns into the monitor. jk, but that mental image though...

On the art?

@@DanielLopez-up6os Sure, you can talk about the art if you want.

Dont think it'd look any different

Jea, the FONV colour scheme was really great.

lasarousi He said early Bethesda-era Fallout. That means the first Fallout games by, well, Bethesda, that being 3 and partially New Vegas

Wasnt NV made by Obsidian?

Mr Mürk Indeed it was, which is why I said "partially." Bethesda distributed the game, provided the engine and made a lot of the assets, including the computers and such, Obsidian wrote the story and the game.

fair enough, sir

OOF.wav

New Vegas LGR.

This is sad that today technology compared is much more superior and any kind of device could work longer than similar items from the 80'. Only if manufacturers wanted to. And wouldn't sell such stuff as consumables, which you have to throw away and replace with a new one after a year or so... Literally, things now are made to be used up, rather than used (for years) with a smile on a face... :/

@ungratefulmetalpansy Bad batch? What you're talking about? Shitty caps on the hardware was/is not an accident. It's happening today as well.

@@override7486 think he's talking about the capacitor plague of the early 2000s. Taiwanese factories making mediocre products led to why most products from that era have shitty caps. Original Xboxs being one of the big examples.

@@charlotteritchie9969 even a little before then there were a few cases of the same type of thing. The xbox was definitely one of the worst cases though. I've got a few in the closet that swelled and went bad stored inside in 3 out of 4 of the xboxs i still have. A lot of stuff used to be relabled at much higher ratings or even outright counterfeited as known quality caps when they were garbage. The home and car audio market were plagued with them for a while. I do agree with his point though, a lot of older caps were amazingly well made and unless they are visibly showing damage or are causing issues they are best left alone. Usually filter caps are the only ones that need regularly replaced in the tube audio world, don't know if there's a pc equivalent to filter caps but I've never seen anything similar.

Yes there are bad cap times. Cheap caps used instead of quality. Old caps with ustable materials And caps used out of spec or.too close to tolerance. And many other reasons

Same!

My 25" 1440p monitor screen and inside my tiny 80x25 gnome-terminal using vim instead of gedit. :p CLI still charming even in 2021.

@@alexandrebouvier7731 the *nix cli is as powerful as a thor's hammer thrown by a nuclear explosion and as precise and delicate as a one-atom thick diamond scalpel. And everything in between.

One of my first Windows 3.1 computers had a white monochrome monitor. No idea what brand. And it was indeed a very different experience, yet perfectly usable for most of what people used Windows for back then.

Yeah. Quite true. I still have the memory of a green monochrome display burned into my mind. As well as the various white phosphor displays of our first PC and the Mac Classic we'd briefly borrowed from my mother's work a few months before that... I'm actually using a Plasma display right now, for older computers, and as a secondary monitor, and among the many things buried in it's menus is a colour calibration tool that lets you show a single colour channel at a time. Sadly you can't permanently enable it, it's strictly for calibration, but showing an image in monochrome through just one channel did hit a pretty strong wave of nostalgia for me. Especially when viewing the green channel only... Of course, what you CAN get to stick, usually, (especially in this case, since it's a hybrid monitor/TV) is turning off colour entirely, giving a monochrome image in greyscale... For that... Semi-retro experience. XD

I know! I was surprised about these types of computers. I think they must have testing this out in real time for a tech competition so something went different inside these computers. :-)

As someone that works with monitors from CRT to Digital, I can agree.

Harry Warburg a monitor with degause? Typically they would degause upon turning on. If you mean the PCs boot and post. That's a satisfying crunch as well

TUUUNG

Oh man! Now I need to find a crt just so I can press that button

(Goes off to hunt for RU-vid videos of monitors being degaussed)

Oh yeah! I also used to enjoy smacking the side of them unnecessarily.

The puzzle game MHRD is set in the 1980s and its interface is entirely monochrome, like you're using a period computer to write your hardware-description language. It's got an option for the colour of the display. The game's audio is just the fan of the computer, so put on some music if you don't like working in silence.

not gonna happen with todays garbage.. planned obsolescence went a long way.

That's right GET OUTTA HERE!

Badumm-Tsss!

Uh Uh you don't tell someone to get outta here because you have no right to tell this person what to do, do you understand me? Now then you're gonna leave this person be, back off and stay away from here or else I'll see to it you are thrown out of here so fast that you'll wake up in an emergency room in another nation mainly England or wherever you'll end up at.

Boo hiss

*claps loudly...slow clap* wait for me, I’m right behind you.

Color Me Twisted so you dont keep it on your PC and dont always have it downloaded and ready to play?

got that upgraded internet babeeeeeeey!

Cannot be Tamed showin yer age there ;)

My first monitor was definitely an amber monochrome monitor, but I don't think it was an Amdek. It was replaced by an IBM 5153 pretty quickly.

Was about to say something similar. The first PC compatible we had was an XT clone, and graphics on it looked exactly like on this monitor. Since we had that computer well over mid 1990's, I was envious for years to my friends who eventually had 486's with VGA and sound cards... Yet now in sort of a perverted nostalgic fashion I'd really want to own an amber monitor again to use with my Hercules card, and I feel sad that our old XT clone is probably scrapped a long time ago already.

You used to have that monitor? When did you first see it?

Did you start gaming when you were like 2 years old?

PhilsComputerLab I did a lot of gaming on my old Mac with a 9 inch black and white screen. This seems like it'd relieve some eyestrain..

I'd play Lands of Lore, Ultima, or Xcom on it.

Helps keep the amber mood?

NotSoGoodGamer18 good Fung shui

low-pressure sodium lamp? (LPS?)

@@aretard7995 severely underrated comment

BAN A SALT LAMPS NOW!

I agree! Never owned an amber monitor growing up but always loved them.

The hours and hours and hours (3am waiting for the linker to finish :-/) I spent sitting in front of Amdeks monitors programming Fortran and C using Epsilon and writing documentation using Final Word.

And it's glowing.

I know right? Back when we had monochrome monitors, most of us hated them and wanted a color monitor but typically couldn't afford one, or work wouldn't buy us one. They were a necessary evil. But lo-and-behold, when you spent a long time using something and then see it again 30 years later, it's a cool feeling.

I'd love to get one to demonstrate. Plotters are rad.

People today, have made pen plotters that are compatible with the old devices.

Very impressive to watch in action. It is made to print CAD vectorized things. It follows each lines and bezier curve as it was drawn in the actual file, not necessarily in a logical, machine wise, way. While visiting my grand father at its work, I loved to watch them plot things. I even requested prints of compressor heads, cylinders, crankshafts to watch them print things. I also remember badly burned up amber screen of their stock management terminals. The HP server running the system had an uptime calculated in YEARS when it was finally disconnected. Wish I could had salvaged things, but everything was thrown away...

Paul Rickards, the guy who made the WiFi232, recently got a Roland plotter, and has been using it to good effect. twitter.com/paulrickards/status/1019408192395206656

I just picked up an xy plotter yesterday, but I believe it's only analog.

Tincho West I also have a bowl of cereal. A nice breakfast, sitting outside with a beautiful morning, and a new LGR video. Life is damn good to us sometimes. It's the little simple things sometimes that make life worth living... :)

Tincho West exactly my thoughts

Tincho West exactly my thoughts

You could probably sell these. That's a great idea...

I know Handheld Legend sells orange backlights for the original DMG and the Game Boy Pocket, mostly wanna do it to the pocket though because of it's more energy efficient circuitry and because of the clearer screen.

I have the opposite opinion. Green is what seems cold to me. It also is kinda harsh on the eyes, imo.

P A S S A R I N H O hell yeah

There must be someone out there who's actually written a program to recreate those credits in text mode.

Also, the "anti-glare coating" isn't really a coating, it's a sheet of thin pantyhose-like fabric over the screen.

I live in the state next to it

teh_supar_hackr 0010101 Which one? Indiana, or Missouri?

Missouri

Indiana boi here

Some of the first supercomputers were made here too. Stuff was going on with computer science at UIUC that MIT or Berkeley didn't really get until later. But people tend to miss that one. And the Chicago area was pretty big in electronics manufacturing until everything got offshored over to Asia starting in the 1980's. Clint could looking at the labels of 1970's TVs and stereos and similar in Goodwill. Tandy/Radio Shack, Sears, Emmerson, Admiral, Zenith, etc... Much didn't come from China (or even Japan) back then.

Well, amber monochrome monitors *were* older than green ones. :P