answers: 1958
context: a TV tuner, making it similar to a LCD TV that offers computer connectivity. The first engineering proposal for a flat-panel TV was by General Electric as a result of its work on radar monitors. Their publication of their findings gave all the basics of future flat-panel TVs and monitors. But GE did not continue with the R&D required and never built a working flat panel at that time. The first production flat-panel display was the Aiken tube, developed in the early 1950s and produced in limited numbers in 1958. This saw some use in military systems as a heads </s> consumption, new technologies are also being found. 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 </s> the most widely produced and sold television display type. LCDs also have a variety of disadvantages. Other technologies address these weaknesses, including organic light-emitting diodes (OLED), FED and SED. Passive matrix LCDs first became common in the 1980s for various portable computer roles. At the time they competed with plasma displays in the same market space. The LCDs had very slow refresh rates that blurred the screen even with scrolling text, but their light weight and low cost were major benefits. Screens using reflective LCDs required no internal light source, making them particularly well suited to laptop computers. Refresh rates
question: when did they come out with flat screen tvs