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• Not to be picayune but - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, August 17 2012 @ 06:59 PM EDT

It used to be that TVs were trapezoidal boxes. Star Trek showed flat panels, but no one started making them. Then suddenly, 20 or 30 years later, everyone started making TVs in the shape of flat rectangles

Back in the 70s, I wrote to Philips for information about TVs and video recording for a school project. In the literature that came back, they were talking about the prospect of "picture frame" TVs in the near future. For all I know, they had it patented (rather likely if they were openly discussing it in publicity material). Any such patents would have expired by now... and how do you know that early flatscreen makers weren't paying patent fees to someone?

Sinclair had a flat-screen pocket TV (-ish) ~1980 using a tricky squashed, round-the corner CRT.

So, forget Star Trek, there's a 35-year-old trail of evidence that bone- fide electronics companies were designing flat-screen TVs.

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