[xyzzy21]

Actually CRTs and vacuum tubes in general are the "far more complex" manufacturing process compared to semiconductor. It's sounds wrong but just watch the following video about Mullard vacuum tube (valve) manufacturing in the early 1960s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDvF89Bh27Y

The transistor would start to displace tubes during the 1960s (when I got into electronics in the early 1970s, you still would learn or use or have as option the user of vacuum tubes but by the end of the 1970s, that was 100% gone for professionals and hobbyists though in 1980s as a freshman EE student we had the last gasp of vacuum tube education corresponding to having to use FORTRAN and punch cards that one last semester for programming as well). At the same time, discrete transistors were arising as the de facto choice in commercial (the adoption "Chasm" for them occurred in the late 1950s). ICs were still "early adopter" in the 1960 and crossed the chasm in the late 1960s, early 1970s which is why the 1970s were the boom decade for Silicon Valley and IC manufacturing.

As I watch tube manufacturing with 40 years of experience in semiconductor, I just cringe at the non-reproducibility and labor involved - it's insane. By contrast, semiconductor (and by commonality of process, OLED) is far simpler. The reason: the planar photolithographic cycle is repeated over and over again in semiconductors which in contrast to the "different at every single step" of tube manufacturing is radially simpler.

[bee_rider]

It depends on how we define define "manufacturing complexity" right? Perhaps (I'm not in manufacturing, so...) it is right to say that a CRT is more complex to build than an LCD or OLED, in the same sense that a suit of plate armor is more complex to build than an M16. The former can be created with lower technology and more manual labor by an expert, the latter can be basically stamped out, some assembly required.