Mil-Spec Roundie...

[Steve McVoy]

Here is another monitor with high quality components:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/ge_4tm15.html

[Sandy G]

I'm not so sure "Mil-Spec" is all the high 'n' mighty its cracked up to be.. R-390As certainly were made to mil-spec standards, but they still suffer from leaky caps, & out of tolerance resistors...maybe not nearly as bad as "civvie" stuff. But maybe the "good" caps weren't around back when, I dunno...But in about all other respects an R-390 is a beautifully made-obviously costly- instrument.

[old_tv_nut]

Mil-spec can be great for some applicatons and irrelevant for others. A monitor is a case where it would be relevant - high quality components designed for long MTBF. But some mil apps mean pushing the envelope of performance rather than life. which you would never do in a consumer product design. In the 60's we ran into some things like that in transistor specs - some devices could meet mil-spec but not the kind of environmental life tests done for consumer TVs. The most stringent non-mil environmental specs are for automotive electronics, due to the temp ranges and voltage supply spikes they have to survive.

All that said, the examples of chassis posted here are obviously built to sturdier rules than consumer TVs, but it's not clear if they could make much more reliable lytics, for example.

[Pete Deksnis]

That GE monitor is commercial gear with a mil-spec heritage IMO.

At the ETF museum a few years ago, when I first saw that GE color monitor linked in Steve's post above, it swept me back to the very early '60s and troubleshooting mill-spec tube-based CRT monitors.

Mil-spec back then meant components designed, manufactured, and tested to mil specs, that were soldered by hand, to mil specs, with mil spec terminal board construction, where every wire got terminated with a service loop that allowed it to be terminated three times over, and enough cooling so that it ran just warm to the touch, including most tubes.