No, they didn’t take up a whole wall. In the book they sound more or less like the monitors you see in Twelve Monkeys or Brazil (both very good Terry Gilliam films by the way). In the case of Brazil, the 1984ish connections are obvious, if not quite as scary.
Now that I think of it, in the book, I don’t really even remember that they were televisions so much as they were cameras, so they may not have even been two-way.
Now the commercial called 1984 from Apple had one heck-of-a-screen. Well, until that silly non-conformist ruined it for everyone.
Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury had full wall TVs, but he was never much of a futurist and based them on CRTs. Reading that book made me think he also wasn’t much of a scientist, either; at one point in the book one screen is broken and he wrote of something like the vacuum leaking out and flowing around the room. I can’t find a proper quote, though.
