cj7hawk
Veteran Member
Here's a good article about the evolution of gas plasma screens. The technology evolved a lot over the years and devices like the Plato screen differ is some ways from more modern screens capable of things like, well, grayscale.
Obviously they're not literally composed of many thousands of independent little bulbs, and most monochrome screens do use an "open cell" design. Color screens, however, need to have the different phosphor colors subdivided by little glass ridges... in other words, they're pretty nightmarishly complex despite not literally being a bunch of tiny bulbs. FWIW, as the article explains, plasma screens don't *have* to be red. Color screens use a xenon plasma that emits ultraviolet light, which in turn stimulates a phosphor. So strictly speaking you can make a plasma screen whatever color you want.
Anyway. As also is made clear by the article, those 1960's plasma displays were *horrendous* power hogs. I don't think you'd be carrying one around on your wrist unless you had a very long extension cord for it. Frankly I think the only real-world tech that even remotely makes sense in the "Pip Boy" would be electroluminescent. Dot matrix EL displays were demonstrated as early as 1965, and non-dot-matrix but pretty complex implementations of it were used for things like the Apollo guidance computer. And notably many of these early EL displays are roughly the same color green as the pip boy display.
Well, if practical were the objective, a 4" OLED with every second line unaddress to create the visual of "scan lines" would suffice would it not?
Though I'm not sure that our concept of practical and @CompaqSniffer 's idea of practical are the same.
I like his project. I think it's a fun idea and I really hope he succeeds -
