{"id":781750,"date":"2026-07-05T12:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T12:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/781750\/"},"modified":"2026-07-05T12:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T12:19:08","slug":"the-persistent-display-we-never-got","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/781750\/","title":{"rendered":"The Persistent Display We Never Got"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We all know the e-ink persistent displays, as they\u2019re cheap and plentiful enough to have become ubiquitous in applications such as supermarket price labels. But we don\u2019t often see some of the other technologies that\u00a0almost did the same thing. The BBC Archive has a report from 1986 showing one of them, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=fM7BpmJlRIs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">a prototype display from STC<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>E-ink relies on flipping the arrangement of black and white particles in its pixels, while this one has a fluid in which the molecules are aligned to let light through, or dispersed randomly, at which point they block light. Frustratingly, we aren\u2019t told what the liquid is, but we are given what might be the reason that we\u2019ve never seen one. The activation voltage is rather high at 200 volts. It\u2019s still a fascinating glimpse of something we might have had, with some tasty early-PC-era portables along the way.<\/p>\n<p>The BBC archive has served up quite a bit of retro goodness over time, and we\u2019ve certainly featured one or two of them over time. A recent one was <a href=\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/2026\/05\/24\/the-email-of-the-future-in-1986\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">this demonstration of email via a flight to Amsterdam<\/a>, from the same year as today\u2019s display.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We all know the e-ink persistent displays, as they\u2019re cheap and plentiful enough to have become ubiquitous in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":781751,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,61],"class_list":["post-781750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=781750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/781751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}