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Orange Gas Plasma displays

N

Neosodium

Experienced Member
Joined
Nov 30, 2010
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Location
Oxfordshire, UK
I'm personally very fond of these displays, and I was wondering what other machines used them than the old Toshiba laptops and Compaq portable III/386.

Anyone know more than I do? :)
 
Wow, a classic mac with a gas plasma screen ... that's what the portable and Powerbook 100 should have been!

Chuck(G) said:
Don't forget EL displays! The Colby PC had one--offhand, I'd call the Colby one of the rarest of the luggables.
Click to expand...

AFAIK EL is just a display backlight for monochrome LCD, correct me if i'm wrong.
 
Yes, they're very cool displays! I'm looking for a replacement for my Compaq Portable III, though it looks like MikeS may have a spare for me -- got shattered in shipping somehow.

The IBM P70 used one too.

IIRC, there was some sort of terminal specific to a mainframe system that used gas plasma displays for its terminal screen. The terminals were taller than they were deep, as a result of not having a necked picture tube in the chassis. Anyone know the name?
 
glitch said:
IIRC, there was some sort of terminal specific to a mainframe system that used gas plasma displays for its terminal screen. The terminals were taller than they were deep, as a result of not having a necked picture tube in the chassis. Anyone know the name?
Click to expand...

IBM 3290.

It was an expensive multisession terminal. And, being IBM, only works on IBM mainframes.

-Ian
 
RetroHacker_ said:
IBM 3290.

It was an expensive multisession terminal. And, being IBM, only works on IBM mainframes.

-Ian
Click to expand...

Yup! That's the one I was thinking of! Apparently some of the PLATO computer systems used their own design with a gas plasma display too.
 
Neosodium said:
AFAIK EL is just a display backlight for monochrome LCD, correct me if i'm wrong.
Click to expand...

While that was and is true for some backlights, that's a different thing. ELDs were used on the Colby, the DG One Model 2 and at least one Grid model. They're addressed in X-Y fashion, just like an LCD, but they're the active part. Freakishly expensive and usually found in military gear because they're nearly unbreakable.

Here's Planar's line card for their ELDs
 
I'd like to see one of these ELDs, they sound interesting. Couldn't find any images on google though.

I noticed the plasma display on the Compaq portable III/386 and the Toshiba T3100e are both Panasonic units; the same exact model I think. Considering this, I wonder why Panasonic never made a laptop/luggable with a PDP screen.
 
Looks distinctly yellow where plasma is deep orange. I wish it hadn't been so expensive or we might have seen a lot more laptops using it. The same could easily be said for gas plasma however...
 
I've a couple of "ITS" touch-screen banking terminals that used gas plasma displays. still well cool! Wish I knew how to program them
 
Red, Yellow and LCD

Red, Yellow and LCD

Was just posting something about couple GRiD palm systems and saw this thread, lot of the early Grid fifteen hundred series system that had the boring LCD display, or the red gas plasma displays or the very unusual yellow plasma fully tempested displays. The red gas plasma produced tons of radio interference so if you used one around any communications equipment it was a problem but the yellow plasma display was completely radio quiet, not only the display is special but the entire system was inside a double shelled case with filtering on all the inputs and outputs. The yellow tempested display was also used on the old fully militarized Compass system with the regular compass just having the red plasma. I have one of the military compasses that still have its program intact and operates from the early eighties, not a bad trick for a bubble memory. There are some pictures on a web page I really need to update at:
http://staff.salisbury.edu/~rafantini/grid_1550_and_1530.htm

Ray F.
 
EL Display?

EL Display?

What's an EL display? Internally the red plasma and the yellow or LCD displays all use different power supplies for the displays. Depending what version you ordered you would get the different power supply for the display and the display itself. I have change and mixed and matched different displays on the Grids before, also noted that the yellow "tempested" display has no controls, where the LCD has a contrast and brightness, the red plasma has a brightness the yellow has nothing you can adjust.
Ray F
 
EL display = ELD = Electroluminescent Display. Very different technology--basically a capacitor with a transparent front electrode and a phosphor-filled dielectric. Run it from AC and the dielectric glows. A computer display is formed by "striping" the electrodes in X- and Y- directions, so that it's addressed much like an LCD.

Ever see any of those little flat night-lights that glow green? Like this one.

They use very little power, last a very long time and are very efficient (more than an LED, for example). The downside is that they can't be viewed in bright ambient light and are restricted to monochromatic displays. Still used in military displays, however.
 
Chuck(G) said:
EL display = ELD = Electroluminescent Display. Very different technology--basically a capacitor with a transparent front electrode and a phosphor-filled dielectric. Run it from AC and the dielectric glows. . . . The downside is that they can't be viewed in bright ambient light and are restricted to monochromatic displays. Still used in military displays, however.
Click to expand...

Perhaps my memory is playing tricks, but I thought I once saw ones described which could produce different colours at different AC frequencies. Have you heard of that?
 
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