George William Gray. LCD screens.

[Geordie McBoyne]

I guess you can call this modern technology.

Extract from todays Daily Mail. Born on this day: George William Gray 1926 -2013

The Scottish chemist is the man who made flat screens possible. He was the key figure in the research behind liquid crystal displays (LCD) At one stage ninety per cent of the world's TVs, computers and digital clocks used the molecules he invented. His work was commissioned by Labour technologies minister John Stonehouse.
Gray, a professor at Hull University has a London-Hull train named after him.

Geordie McBoyne.

[peter scott]

Aye! It was a sad day when this man decided to hasten the demise of the cathode ray tube removing all they lovely geometry challenges no tae mention convergence and purity.

The world has become a poorer place.

Peter

[BusyBee]

Taking a moment to remember him.

Then I wonder about all these even more modern things. Somehow the pace of things has probably precluded many modern brilliant people from future recognition.

Tracy

[Mike Watterson]

We might never have had CRTs.
"In 1888,[17] Friedrich Reinitzer (1858–1927) discovered the liquid crystalline nature of cholesterol extracted from carrots (that is, two melting points and generation of colors) and published his findings at a meeting of the Vienna Chemical Society on May 3, 1888 (F. Reinitzer: Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Cholesterins, Monatshefte für Chemie (Wien) 9, 421–441 (1888)).[18] In 1904, Otto Lehmann published his work "Flüssige Kristalle" (Liquid Crystals). In 1911, Charles Mauguin first experimented with liquid crystals confined between plates in thin layers. "

CRTs are also Victorian and the cold cathode type came before Triodes. LEDs and Transistors also have pre WWII origins. The success and cheapness (automated production by 1938) of valves and poor purity of materials held back semiconductors.
The main difficulty with electronic TV was never the display, but the camera. Both Baird's and Farnsworth's approaches were a dead end. Obviously the electron gun solved addressing a display screen or camera target. A device using separate plasma cells (display) or photocells (camera) was totally impractical without transistors and really ICs. It was ICs that made dotmatrix LCDs viable and for larger panels with more resolution and better viewing angle you need the amorphous transistors on the glass substrate.

George William Gray didn't come up with the idea, but he was the first to have a viable system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-cry...80%931960s

The last 40 to 60 years hasn't seen much new science in electronics, it's more about viable materials and better production engineering. OLED have more in common with 1960s & 1970s EL panels than normal LEDs.

[BusyBee]

Perhaps it's just the massive increase in integrated circuit (mainly digital) technology and software engineering in the last 40 to 60 years. My opinion is more that massive processing power is now used rather than even thinking about implementing relatively simple electronic solutions in many cases. The skillset has changed. Even I am guilty in using an Arduino from time to time rather than putting together an analogue circuit.

Tracy

[Mike Watterson]

Flash memory rather than EPROM has made PIC, 8051, Atmel and FPGA very accessible. Cheap and fast to program, even in circuit. Also free microcontroller languages (JAL, C, Basic) and tools. $2 PICs fast enough to use as Frequency counters and replace custom chips in old gear. Yet the architecture of low & midrange PIC is 1976 and the ARM (as cheap as 50c) based on the Acorn Archimedes and Newton cpus of 1980s.
I remember designing custom layout LCDs in 1980s with EL panel backlights.

[jjl]

Perhaps it's just the massive increase in integrated circuit (mainly digital) technology and software engineering in the last 40 to 60 years. My opinion is more that massive processing power is now used rather than even thinking about implementing relatively simple electronic solutions in many cases. The skillset has changed. Even I am guilty in using an Arduino from time to time rather than putting together an analogue circuit.

Tracy

As hobbyists, we can choose the type of circuitry we would like to use to solve a particular electronics problem, and long may that continue.
A company making items for sale, especially to consumers, will choose designs that perform as required for minimal cost. They will use, for example, a microcontroller costing less than 1 GBP in a washing machine. Such a device can deal with all of the user interface and motor control aspects of the machine apart from higher power switching. A small PCB can contain all of the control circuitry for the machine. The washing machine company would be mad and uncompetitive to use anything other than such devices - it is the correct solution for the present times.

John