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Trammell Hudson has written a blog post about his project to retro fit a Motorola MDT-9100T "Mobile Data Terminal" from eBay with a BeagleBone Black running a modern operating system. He figues their retro-future design was too neat to pass up and that the stylish housing combined with an aperture-less amber CRT looks like something slipped from the Fallout or BladeRunner universe into our own. So he and some others at NYC Resistor bought a few and are repurposing them. A lot of soldering and cable smithing is involved.
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Retrofitting a Motorola MDT-9100T "Mobile Data Terminal" with a BeagleBone Black
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Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 5, Informative) by SomeGuy on Wednesday August 08 2018, @05:20PM
One really can't appreciate how sharp these "apertureless" monochrome CRTs really could be unless it is seen in person.
During the 80s and right up to 1990 or so, monochrome CRTs were still preferred over color CRTs for serious business use. Text was just so much sharper without the RGB apertures required by color CRTs. Green phosphor was popular mainly because that is the native color of phosphor, not because it was easier on the eyes. Amber was much easier to look at for long periods of time, although desktop publishing including the Apple Macintosh preferred paper white. Quite frankly even today they seem sharp and easier to read in comparison to average consumer computer LCD monitors.
Anyone who gets a chance to visit a vintage computing festival really should do so. Lots of great old ideas and machines that could have been something had markets been different. You might be blown away by how mono CRTs look in person, especially when used as vector displays like those uses on Vectrex games, Asteroids, or BattleZone.