In Saturday Night Live’s second, third, and fourth seasons, Dan Aykroyd played a recurring character named Irvin Mainway who sold dangerous toys to kids, like a space helmet that was just a clear plastic bag and a rubber band to affix it, and a bag of broken glass. Hey, it was the 70s. Lawn darts were still legal and seatbelts weren’t mandatory. Seeing this 1984 ad from Langley-St. Clair made me immediately think of Irvin Mainway.
Langley-St. Clair’s product
Langley-St. Clair’s product line consisted of replacement monochrome CRTs for computers and data terminals. For the low price of $99.95, you could get your choice of a green or amber long persistence monitor, with or without anti-glare coating, to replace the sometimes flickery displays that came with computers at the time and reduce or eliminate eye fatigue. They advertised in the January 1984 issue of Byte magazine. They also advertised in other magazines like 80micro, but the ad in the January 1984 issue of Byte was the best.
The ad showed a TRS-80 Model III, Televideo data terminal, and Kaypro II all sporting amber Langley-St. Clair displays.
The problem is, they sold it as a user-installable upgrade, complete with a guy with a goofy grin holding a display tube and a screwdriver touting how he’d just installed one in his Kaypro. Considering a tube can contain a charge of 25,000 volts, if you don’t have the right equipment and training, a tube swap can be a dangerous project. Potentially deadly.
The whole idea behind monochrome monitors was for them to be easy on the eyes, so if you had a flickery one, a tube replacement might be appealing. But it’s not an upgrade worth risking your life over. If you had a burned-in CRT, this would also be appealing. Screen savers weren’t common yet in 1984.
And people did buy them. I found two letters from readers published in 80micro saying they’d installed one. And 80micro gave the replacement CRTs a positive review in their December 1982 issue, starting on page 51. The review noted the CRT came with an 8-page instruction booklet that contained safety warnings.
Why working on CRTs is dangerous
CRT-related projects are very popular on Youtube, because working on CRTs is a lost art and repair shops who will work on them are nearly non-existent now. But those videos always tell you not to work on a CRT if you don’t know what you’re doing, because of the potentially lethal voltages.
That’s why I think the Langley-St. Clair replacement tubes are a product only Irvin Mainway could love. But since the voltages in a CRT aren’t necessarily household knowledge, the humor value of the guy with a goofy grin holding a tube and a screwdriver is limited to a small potential audience.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.