Gosh, it sure seems like this author got a lot of this history from the "Gas and Glass" chapter of my book THE FRIENDLY ORANGE GLOW (Pantheon Books, 2017), which is a history of the PLATO system including the invention of the plasma display. Or maybe he got it from an AI that got it from vacuuming up my book.

Funny how the article has zero citations or notes.

So it goes.

Orange dot-matrix gas plasma displays were used on pinball machines for over 2 decades before the manufacturers switched to colour LCD screens. Now instead of clever pixel art and high legibility we have cheesy CGI and so much information on screen that I have no idea what to shoot for…

I loved my 50ish inch Panasonic plasma tv. It’s still used in our cottage. The blacks are deep, no blur and remote control response was instant unlike a lot of modern smart tvs.

When I started at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne in 1988, the computer labs were still filled with PLATO terminals. They were extremely cool--nice displays, and many were also touch screens. I did my physics homework on them, and played games but I definitely didn't use them to their full extent.

Looking at photos of them now they appear blocky and relatively ugly, but I remember them fondly.

Really wish we could have gotten SED[1] or FED... imagine the motion clarity of CRT with the size and weight of LCD. There's still nothing like it... even 500hz OLED still can't match it, you'd really need double that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-conduction_electron-em...

Plasma screens, like computer case windows, are incredibly rude but the people using them have no idea that their behavior is inappropriate. Both emit significant amounts of HF radio interference which bounces around the ionosphere degrading a shared resource for all of Earth. And even more VHF and up interference which only degrades a shared resource till the next hill. It's pretty much just like littering in a public park.