How does a screen work?

True – but on the other hand, it was "only" a few million elements, and very large ones, compared to, say, the DRAM chips of the time. Monitors certainly make the engineering feat more tangible, though!

The phosphor still drops off very quickly [0][1][2], roughly within a millisecond. That’s why you would need a 1000 Hz LCD/OLED screen with really high brightness (and strobing logic) to approximate CRT motion clarity. On a traditional NTSC/PAL CRT, 1 ms is just under 16 lines, but the latest line is already much brighter than the rest. The slow-motion recording showing roughly one line at a time therefore seems accurate.

[0] https://blurbusters.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/crt-phosp...

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Phosphor-persistence-of-...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Stimulus-succession-on-C...

And still it was possible as a side attack, with just looking at the reflected brightness of a screen, to get a perfect image back.

I only recently found out that the tech to save images wasn’t invented, so they couldn’t display a revolving logo between shows. So… so the BBC had a permanent real-life logo with a permanent camera in front of it.

So yes, any image was extremely ephemeral at the time.

PS: Apparently it’s called a Noddy, it’s a video camera controlled by a servomotor to pan and tilt (or 'nod', hence the name Noddy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noddy_(camera)

It's parallax, basically. The pigment dots and mask holes are positioned such that when you look from the perspective of the "red" electron gun (*), you only see red pigment dots. Move a couple cm to the "blue" gun and the parallax shift now makes you to see only blue pigment dots instead. Or from the other direction, no matter which "red" dot you stand at, you only see the "red" gun through "your" hole.

The exact sizes, shapes, and positions of the pigment dot triples (and/or the mask holes) are presumably chosen so that this holds even away from the main axis. Also, the shape of the deflecting field is probably tuned to keep the rays as well-focused as possible. Similarly to how photographic lenses are carefully designed to minimize aberrations and softness even far from the optical axis.

(*) Simplifying a bit by assuming that the beam gets deflected immediately as it leaves the gun, which is of course inaccurate.

Each hole in the shadow mask acts as a pinhole camera, giving an inverted image (in electrons) of the three guns. All three beams get bent nearly the same amount, but yes there is some distortion which is traditionally corrected for by a set of convergence coils and corresponding circuit with knobs for static and dynamic convergence [0]. A pain to adjust, BTW.

[0] https://antiqueradio.org/art/RCACTC-11ConvergBoardNewRC.jpg

For me it was the opposite. Learning how a monochrome CRT requires no mask sort of destroyed my world view of what a display had to have. pixels(even the quasi pixels as found in a color CRT mask) were not actually required or present.

As a result monochrome terminal text has this surprising sharpness to it.(surprising if you are used to color displays). But the real visual treat are the long persistence phosphor radar scopes.

All our senses are.

It still basically should be, so long as well-designed sites give you the "small screen"/mobile layout.

Even apart from that, a lot of laptops still have 1280x800 as the default resolution, and that's only double the width of 640x480. Honestly, I'd actually be more worried about OS and browser chrome eating up the space than websites themselves being unusable.

You might add ICE cars to that list. All kinds of cool stuff being developed around small turbocharged engines and other efficiency gains, excellent transmissions, etc.