Keeping the future of cars alive, 80s style

Here at Hackaday we are a diverse group of writers, some of whom have jobs outside of this device, and others whose work also appears on the pages of other publications in different fields. One of these is our colleague [Lewin Day]and he wrote a cracking piece for Utopia on The effort to keep an obscure piece of American automotive electronic history alive. We consider large-screen car consoles a new phenomenon, but General Motors was equipping some of its models with small Trinitron CRT displays in the late 1980s. If you own one of these cars, the CRT will likely be inoperable if you don't see it [Jon Morlan] And his work in repairing and restoring it.

Lewin's article goes into enough technical detail that we won't simply rehash it here, but it's interesting to compare the painstaking repair approach with that of replacement or emulation. It would be relatively easy to replace a CRT with a modern LCD display that displays the same video, and even use a modern single-board computer to emulate much of the dead system. But we're fully aware that for many car enthusiasts, that's not the point; it's the reality of it Fucking 'CRT In the dashboard that makes the car. We'll probably never drive a 1989 Oldsmobile Toronado. But we definitely want it if this specific version of the future is equipped.

Lewin's automotive writing is worth paying attention to. He once brought us to a motorcycle camper.