With our new LCD TV, I miss the magic of being able to correct color problems by degaussing a screen. Once I laughed when my sister told me that she called a TV repair man because her picture color was all messed up and he fixed it without even touching the set.
Do you miss the quirks of obsolete technology too?
Hey, I had to have my color CRT monitor degaussed many years back. We’d had monochrome monitors for many years and I’d occasionally use a magnet to “move the letters around” on the screen. We upgraded to color CRTs and about a week later I absent mindedly pulled out my magnet to play a little bit. Oh Oh, bad JuJu! :smack:
When the tech showed up I claimed ignorance of what had happened and we degaussed the shadow mask. 
I’ll bet they don’t even have degaussers anymore. At least not on hand.
Having done the process manually quite a few times, I don’t miss it at all. (Do they even still make handheld degaussing coils?)
I do kinda miss the old “Bwommmmmm” noise when a CRT display fired up and self-degaussed. Now, at best, TVs and monitors just make a slight click.
More TV-based nostalgia today’s kids probably have no clue about - turning off the TV and watching that white spot slowly fade away.
OTOH, I really don’t miss having to mess with the fine-tuning every time you changed the channel, and Mom yelling “Don’t spin the dial!”
I miss hitting the degauss button on a CRT that hadn’t been degaussed in a while and seeing the monitor next to it shimmer from the sheer electromagnetic flux.
We degauss all the time. But tapes/hard drives, not monitors. (Got me a big ol’ powerful degausser!)
All you have to do is flip the magnet over. After a few flips, from increasing distances, most of the messed up colors go away.
Did you know that they degauss Navy ships? When I was on the Nimitz, we were degaussed and all of the TVs onboard developed that funky messed-up color look.
From the same era as what gotpasswords brought up: I liked pressing the buttons on the original car radios that had programmable presets. You dialed in a station, yanked out a button and pushed it back in to “program” it, and then whenever you wanted that station, you just mashed the button and you could feel all of the mechanical parts working to shove the dial back over to the preset. Kind of like feeling a revolver’s action working as you pull the trigger.
I just degaussed mine. It was awsome.
I had no idea you could, or would, degauss TV sets. However, in a previous lifetime, I would degauss videotapes so they could be reused. I remember two degaussers – one a handheld thing, and another a stationary machine you’d pass the tape through.
Degauss, degauss, degauss! Jesus, I haven’t even said the word in years.
I just degaussed my screen. It did not get rid of some burn in, but my picture now seems crisper. This could be illusion.
When I worked in a tape library, we had a big ol’ heavy degausser, with a small treadmill. We would stack tapes on one ond of the treadmill, and they would pass over the magnets, making an awful racket. It was much fun.
I ran my work enemies access card and wallet over the degausser. Don’t know if it had any effect, he never mentioned it.
I’m not a t.v. repairman but I’m a cameraman. Less than a week ago, oddly enough, I put my hands on my old degausser. Heavy thing, hand-held. Would do a videotape in about 60 seconds. Killer on cassettes- the cassette would just jump and tremble from the magnetic force.
Loved that thing. Kept it around, god knows why. Was VERY entertaining to move around a monitor.
Cartooniverse
Degaussers work on treadmills? :dubious:
How else would they get airborne?
Maybe we should degauss the hamsters. You know, just for fun?
The only thing I have ever degaussed was an aircraft carrier. (Never used it on televisions. I just slowly grew used to the changing hues).
I don’t miss it at all.
Well, you were apparently degaussing televisions too (see post six).
Any CRT tech worth his salt has one on hand, you betcha. Often , the built-in degausing coil is insufficient to completely degauss the shadow mask, leaving faint blotches of discoloration on a color purity test. A hand degausser is about the best way to be sure all the residual magnetism is gone. I still have one I made by doubling over the coil from an old CRT computer monitor.
When I worked at Philips PTV in Knoxville, we had a big degaussing coil for you know what. We were tossing some old hard drives (40 to 60 megabytes–nobody wanted them) with some proprietary files. To save time, I got the bright idea of using the giant degausser, rather than the erasing each drive via some Norton utility which would take days.
After running the coil for a couple of minutes, I discovered I could still boot up the computer. I ran some applications–nothing was damaged that I could tell. How could I avoid the tedium of a few days?
I used a hammer. Much more satisfying 
I used to watch that thing in absolute terror. I was not supposed to watch TV after school but did anyway. I can’t count the number of times I heard Dad’s car door slam and jumped up to turn off the TV only to have that infernal dot shining right in the middle of the screen when he walked in…Thanks for the memories @###!
That’s why, as part of the preps for the evolution, all televisions were to be moved 6-10 feet away from the outside skin of the ship. For a carrier, not a big problem. For subs and some of the smaller ships, I can see how it would be an issue.
Yeah I miss degaussing. It was about the only maintainence a mere Level 3a Computer Dude could do on a monitor.