I'm sure it was also possible to buy poor quality versions of older mechanical signs. Perhaps newer technology made it a little easier for suppliers to hoodwink incautious purchasing managers, but that's all.
Britain's railways have mostly orange LED platform signage. The LEDs have good lifetime and each sign has enough local intelligence that a failure in one doesn't knock them all out, but they also don't run Windows, because that's neither necessary nor sufficient.
You can even buy replicas (either desktop sized or full size if you're really train crazy) which pull data from the national railway system over the Internet unlike a real one but function the same. So e.g. configure one to show you platform 2 from your local railway station and you'll know at a glance if the train home is running normally before leaving work.
Early full colour displays suffer bad burn-in, but the orange LEDs don't have a burn in problem and many have been in service for decades.
Yes it is technically possible for one LED or even the entire sign to fail, and at the smallest stations there may not be any other signs for the affected trains but that's not different than any alternative, the fault will be reported and a fitter will be out to fix or replace the sign.
I simply don't believe that previously all the signage which exists today was duplicated but mechanically or with hand-written signs. Instead my guess is that mostly you just didn't know. On a London bus for example, before they had screens telling you where you are, which bus this is and what the next stop is, there was nothing. This is fine if it's "your" bus and you know the route, but it made buses very intimidating for visitors. Today iBus has screens and spoken announcements, "2 to Marylebone" says your bus, and the display spells out Marylebone in case you don't understand the pronunciation. Later on another bus "Lavington Street for Tate Modern" says the screen. You have no idea where "Lavington Street" is but the bus knows this is where to get off for the Tate Modern art gallery, and now you know too.
> Instead my guess is that mostly you just didn't know. On a London bus for example, before they had screens telling you where you are, which bus this is and what the next stop is, there was nothing
For the most part, this was solved by the driver or the bus / train / subway / tram conductor [0] shouting the stops out or announcing them via microphone. If you use trains in Switzerland, you will notice that some conductors will still announce the next stop when they enter a car to check the tickets. As in "Next stop Zurich main station, tickets please".
Britain's railways have mostly orange LED platform signage. The LEDs have good lifetime and each sign has enough local intelligence that a failure in one doesn't knock them all out, but they also don't run Windows, because that's neither necessary nor sufficient.
You can even buy replicas (either desktop sized or full size if you're really train crazy) which pull data from the national railway system over the Internet unlike a real one but function the same. So e.g. configure one to show you platform 2 from your local railway station and you'll know at a glance if the train home is running normally before leaving work.
Early full colour displays suffer bad burn-in, but the orange LEDs don't have a burn in problem and many have been in service for decades.
Yes it is technically possible for one LED or even the entire sign to fail, and at the smallest stations there may not be any other signs for the affected trains but that's not different than any alternative, the fault will be reported and a fitter will be out to fix or replace the sign.
I simply don't believe that previously all the signage which exists today was duplicated but mechanically or with hand-written signs. Instead my guess is that mostly you just didn't know. On a London bus for example, before they had screens telling you where you are, which bus this is and what the next stop is, there was nothing. This is fine if it's "your" bus and you know the route, but it made buses very intimidating for visitors. Today iBus has screens and spoken announcements, "2 to Marylebone" says your bus, and the display spells out Marylebone in case you don't understand the pronunciation. Later on another bus "Lavington Street for Tate Modern" says the screen. You have no idea where "Lavington Street" is but the bus knows this is where to get off for the Tate Modern art gallery, and now you know too.