Not just big and heavy. Old monitors were deep. Corners were a great place to dump all that wasted depth.
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.
https://aperturegrille.fandom.com/wiki/SONY_GDM-FW900
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.
I had a 21” trinitron at uni in the 00s— it was beautiful, ran 2048x1536, and weighed a ton.
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.
But degauss made everything wobble for a few moments.
i would still want one of those monitors, but the few i’ve seen are ridiculously priced.
… But as soon as someone showed you The Line, you could no longer NOT see it, which meant you had to sell it.
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.
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.
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Now they’re shallow and wide. Exactly the opposite of what this provides.
Except for those who keep using postage stamp laptop screen like in the picture, I suppose.
Also because everyone loves sitting in the corner. Bonus points if it’s made out of oak and weighs 1500 kg.
My experience are that these are made out of chipboard and gradually breakdown after a few months of use
My experience is that they collapsed under the weight of contemporary CRTs.
I would love to see a contemporary CRT :(
I had one for 10 years and the only thing that broke was the keyboard tray because I put a lot of pressure on it with my feet. I still have the filling cabinet that came with it after 21 years.
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.
probably because monitors where so big
Nah. Legroom.
Legroom is key for some of us, and the shallow side runs have nothing underneath for space.
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.
This. I was actually looking for one recently, and the selection was terrible.
Yeah the selection was all antique for me. Sucks. I was determined to build my own. But then chose against it and succumbed to the norm
Getting the right keyboard height was almost impossible. That keyboard tray was about 6 months of knee bumps away from death!
Motorized desks really improved things for me.
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.
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.
It was all about depth, a monitor back in the days was massive.
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.
Oh, I still have good and bad memories of my old Sony G520 monitors. Great image quality, bad for my back to carry it up the stairs after a LAN party.
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.
That is not an illusion of space when you have a CRT that fits perfectly at the corner.
My multi monitor setup works great on my corner desk!
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.
And there was still lots of paperwork in the paperless office.
I mean, photo was taken with a potato. Wifi router on the top, 15" laptop on the desk. Is 2015 really nostalgia worthy?
Kinda. Corner desks are not popular anymore because 90% of the benefits are lost with modern tech.
Like others have said, they were pretty amazing for CRTs. Reminds me of my super cool desk in the early 2000s. Now I wouldn’t even consider one.
I still have a corner desk at home. We got it when we purchased our first home. It is a solid office furniture style that weighs a ton. Flat screens where becoming the norm and we got it for like 15% of the list price.
What’s nice about it today.
The router, modem, backup hard drives, security system, are all tucked behind the double monitors we have now. That back corner offers a lot of desk space for stuff that needs to be tucked away and not bothered.
Leg room- there’s tons of it under the desk.
Fits well in the bedroom we have setup as an office. We have a window to the back yard in that room. The corner desks allows us to lean back to look outside while keeping the monitors out of the sun.
Writing surfaces on either side. I am ambidextrous and can write with either hand. However the desk works for both right or left handed people.
Hey more power to you! If I hadn’t received my desk for free I’d still probably be using my old corner desk. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
Probably at least one big reason is that most non techy people switched to laptops which can be used anywhere, so no reason to have a huge computer desk taking space anymore when the dining table or sofa is good enough.
Good point!! And lots of people don’t even get those anymore since phones go online
I still don’t know why we got rid of these. They were space-efficient and made a computer room look great.
Good times playing Gary’s Mod and Counter Strike sitting at that exact same desk.
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.
Anytime I see these desks, I immediately hear the commercial jingle for 1-888-45-Closet, 🎵 Closet World 🎶
I still have one of these
