Talk:Charactron

No matrix!
There was no 5x7 matrix in a Charactron! Who writes this stuff?! It's called a CHARACTRON because it displayed fully formed characters! It wasn't called a MATRIXTRON, they wouldn't have needed all the complexity, they would have just used a regular CRT. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 207.134.83.228 (talk • contribs).
 * Umm, did you read the article? It describes two different uses for the tube.
 * Atlant 11:48, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

If I might jump in... Charactron was a registered trademark by Consolidated Vultee / Convair / General Dynamics / Stromberg-Carlson / Anacomp for its line of stencil-beam cathode ray tubes first developed in 1950. The kep phrase is stencil -- the beam was cookie-cuttered by a mask for delivery to a phosphor screen. Charactron tubes are, by definition, direct view devices.

Monoscopes or symbol-ray tubes scan a small diameter beam over a printed targetproducing an electrical signal output.

Charactron technology was also licensed to Hughes Aircraft to its line of Typotron CRTs which were storgae tubes with a Charactron type gun.

Monoscope tubes ranged from the earliest National-Union devices used for test pattern pictures of "pretty girls" in early television work to the Raytheon Symbolray character generators.

Now, I don't want to just jump into an edit war because I can't prove that a dot matrix device did not exist -- so let's chat this out and we will all come away learning something. Thanks OldZeb 21:37, 16 November 2006 (UTC)