It's astonishing how much our predecessors refined the design of CRT's and how much they achieved with technology of the day that to nowadays generations seems "very old" and defunct. It fascinates me still how engineers back then managed to get the most out of existing materials by applying physics in the right way. I believe it's an "art" that is slowly being lost due to the digitalization of society. Much can indeed be solved using digital tech, whereas in the "analog age" each problem almost always needed its own solution
Almost without argument, Tektronix pushed CRT technology and performance to a level that was never matched by anybody else. What they made, in many cases, was not merely a means of displaying the output of a measurement instrument, but the CRT itself was a precision instrument that allowed Tektronix scopes of the era to outperform all competitors. You could simply see things going on in circuits because of the sensitivity and response of the Tektronix CRT that would not be seen with competitor's scopes.
