I remember talking to coworkers at their desks, leaning over their CRTs and feeling the heat coming off them. Not the worst thing in the winter, but I hate to think how much more AC we burned through in the summer.
CRTs were one reason, but the other was because you had to have storage for all your manuals and CDs and Floppy disks and other stuff you were constantly putting in your computer and taking out.
I had a little corner cabinet that closed up when it wasn't in use. You would open the doors and slide the keyboard tray out when you wanted to use the computer.
lol .... I've got the exact same desk and I converted it to a longer desk to place two systems on it ... the corner design is a pain because they place a post at the corner so any leg room you had down there is lost because the of corner post. Then you also lose space with the keyboard tray because only a small area is clear in the center and you lose space at the angled corners where your hand keeps hitting the left keyboard side and the right hand is squeezed in by the desk and mouse. Then you also lose space in the corner desk area with a large monitor because you can't recess a 26" flat screen, you have to bring it out. I had to move and redesign the upper shelves to place two 26" monitors in the corner and one off the side.
Neat idea but it doesn't really save you any space or increase comfort.
I miss my corner desk so much. It's not just leg room, it's left and right storage. Take up a bulky corner. Looks better in a room. I'm surprised at the lack of corner computer desks in modern furniture.
I love them but I don't bother with custom jobs like this. I just put a desk in a corner and have another desk or table of the same height but up against it. I like putting some shelves in the corner behind the monitor for storage
both of our desks in the office are 'corner' ones.. no hutch over either, though, so the back corner space is usable. one has fairly large laser printer in the corner and the deeper 'leg' of the desk does still have a crt monitor (19in trinitron) on it (the other side has three 5:4 lcd), the other desk holds a sff slim tower and a rack for file folders in its corner. they each also have one or two midtower pc on the floor under the corner and out of the way.
I remember when we had lan parties back in the day and one of my friends who was an intern in a it firm could take one of their super nice monitors home. It was just as deep as a normal monitor and 19 inches i think, but it was somehow special or better because the screen itself wasn't curved, it was straight. That thing was so heavy it almost broke my desk that i offered him. It was a two man operation to move that thing. i mean more of a two boy operation, it was still heavy as fuck.
Sounds like a Sony Trinitron to me. I had a 17" one for about a decade and it was equally magnificent and heavy. The largest one was 24" 16:10 widescreen.
I wanted one so badly, but while these were finally somewhat affordable in 2010 (and still vastly superior to any flat-screen monitor), the shipping costs would have been ruinous.
So in what way were they better? Back in the day, even he didn't know, the only answer i got from him was that tge screen was flat. I didn't really bother anymore because that was also the year people started showing up with flatscreens.
Sharper and brighter images for a while. The aperture grille design allowed more light through than the shadow masks for a while until shadow mask manufacturing quality caught up in the late '80s. The flat screen offered a simpler geometry that allowed for sharper images until the old school CRT manufacturing caught up in the mid '90s. By the early '00s, there were really no advantages and they were riding on name recognition as a superior brand until the late 00's when LCDs finally overcame their size and price hurdles.
God, I hated Trinitrons. We had them at work and while they had noticeably sharper images, my brain never could filter out the two horizontal wires that stabilized the grill.
I worked in tech since about 2000. I was super evangelical about lcd's. Wanted to get rid of our crts asap. Unfortunately the ones we kept the longest were huge ones that had geat specs.
I was doing an intern term as IT support for a school in 2006 and I had to change all the screens they use, as they upgraded gear while the students had a holiday.
I had to lug these 21" or were they even 23" CRT's.
MASSIVE.
Still hurts my back to think about it. Dozens and dozens off those things ufffff. I too gave a few to some friends who wanted them as they got donated somewhere so
Luckily the replacements were TFT's. Even though they weighed like 5x what similar flat screens weigh nowaday.
LANs were an entirely different business when monitors took so much space
My wife had a flat screen TV that was like 40" across when I met her. When we moved in together it took 3 people almost an hour to get that thing down the stairs. It must have weighed 400 pounds. We used nylon webbing straps on our forearms to loop under the TV and provide some support, and it left deep, red marks on our arms for over a week. Those fucking things must have been filled with lead.
Oh I had a really great corner desk for many years. I loved it so much. Similar to the one in the pic but no shelves at all, just all desk and a really sturdy steel frame.
The thing I liked most about it was that your arms were really well supported while typing and it never jiggled the monitor when you typed like my current cheapo IKEA desk. The bloody ginormous monitors of the time were a factor too as OP says.
They don't work well with widescreen monitors, let alone ultrawide or multi monitor setups. They give this illusion of space but ultimately they're just too cramped.
They really were. I had a 21" Dell Trinitron "flatscreen" monitor as my last CRT. It took a LOT of jiggling to get that beast into my car. Corner desk was so good for just eating up the depth.
Great monitor though in fairness. Very kind on the eyes compared to other ones I'd previously used. You kinda forget how harsh monitors used to be on your eyes in those days.
Yep I know what you mean, I had an iiyama 21" crt and that beast was massive. I also preferred it over most first and second generation flat screens (especially tft before lcd got more affordable), those were generally too bright, and got really blurry when you tried to dim anything.
Yeah, those early TFT's were bloody awful. Apart from the size benefit, I really didn't understand why people were rushing to switch to them. Movement in games felt really janky and God forbid your graphics card wasn't powerful enough to run a game at their native resolution.
