That’s two bona fide museum pieces successfully resurrected
Their combined ages add up to more than a century. So what could I possibly use to test them? Analogue TV broadcasts were turned off in 2009. And then I remembered my quadcopter drone. This has a tiny wireless camera that broadcasts analogue video, to a receiver for the first-person video goggles. By hacking the output cable from the receiver (see the How To box) I was able to connect to the RCA plugs on these ancient monitors.
The phosphor glow
At first, all I saw was flickering diagonal scan lines. But fiddling with the horizontal-hold and vertical-hold dials to sync the raster scan with the input signal eventually rewarded me with a green and black image of the view through the camera. On two of them, anyway. The Apple Monitor II showed an illuminated power light but the screen itself remained stubbornly dark. It’s possible that the electron gun that powers the tube has blown.
But still! That’s two bona fide museum pieces successfully resurrected. I felt like John Logie Baird, inventing television for the first time, as I peered at the grainy image of myself. After I was done high-fiving myself though, I started to ponder whether there was anything
useful that these monitors could still do in 2017. The Apple III monitor earns itself a stay of execution, at least until I have a chance to test the Apple III I took it from. I don’t have an Apple II to go with the other one, but it’s far too nice to chuck out. I tried pointing the FPV camera at the screen of some of my other Macs to see if I could mirror the desktop to the external monitor. But to nobody’s great surprise, the resulting image was so low-res that I could only just make out whether there was a window open on the screen or not.
So for now, this tiny monitor is moonlighting as the worst security camera ever. When the doorbell rings, the wireless camera at the sitting room window sends me a picture that is just about good enough to tell that someone is at the door. Which the doorbell previously managed to do quite happily by itself.