Plasma Display - History

History

In 1936, Kálmán Tihanyi, a Hungarian engineer, described the principle of "plasma television" and conceived the first flat-panel display system.

The monochrome plasma video display was co-invented in 1964 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by Donald Bitzer, H. Gene Slottow, and graduate student Robert Willson for the PLATO Computer System. The original neon orange monochrome Digivue display panels built by glass producer Owens-Illinois were very popular in the early 1970s because they were rugged and needed neither memory nor circuitry to refresh the images. A long period of sales decline occurred in the late 1970s because semiconductor memory made CRT displays cheaper than the 2500 USD 512 x 512 PLATO plasma displays. Nonetheless, the plasma displays' relatively large screen size and 1 inch thickness made them suitable for high-profile placement in lobbies and stock exchanges.

Burroughs Corporation, a maker of adding machines and computers, developed the Panaplex display in the early 1970s. The Panaplex display, generically referred to as a gas-discharge or gas-plasma display, uses the same technology as later plasma video displays, but began life as seven-segment display for use in adding machines. They became popular for their bright orange luminous look and found nearly ubiquitous use in cash registers, calculators, pinball machines, aircraft avionics such as radios, navigational instruments, and stormscopes; test equipment such as frequency counters and multimeters; and generally anything that previously used nixie tube or numitron displays with a high digit-count throughout the late 1970s and into the 1990s. These displays remained popular until LEDs gained popularity because of their low-current draw and module-flexibility, but are still found in some applications where their high-brightness is desired, such as pinball machines and avionics. Pinball displays started with six- and seven-digit seven-segment displays and later evolved into 16-segment alphanumeric displays, and later into 128x32 dot-matrix displays in 1990, which are still used today.