At work I had a Fluke 8040(?) that had the LCD tilted up. Worked great, but after a half dozen years we had so many terminals in (and out of) service that I couldn’t spend as much time troubleshooting, and since Lear Siegler was less than a dozen miles away, we just bought enough spares as replacements for the ones out of service and being repaired. Things weren’t so bad when there were only a hundred and twenty, but when the administrators saw productivity was much better, they all wanted them for their department. So a couple hundred grew into 3 or 4 hundred. And then the Apples and IBM PCs came on the scene…
The original Lear Siegler terminals had a CRT assembly made by Ball Bros, a good reliable CRT. But to save money, Lear Siegler replaced them with cheaper CRTs from this foreign company that I’d never heard of. And then when the Lear Siegler terminals went on the fritz, a column of smoke came out of the vents on top. This was very alarming to the users, but it was only a five cent resistor, in series with the DC power, that burned up. So instead of a resistor, I replaced it with a 1/4 amp fuse. It solved the problem, but I wondered why this unknown Korean company, Samsung, didn’t put a fuse in their CRTs.
