David Harmon wrote:

I recently got an ancient monochrome video monitor from a friend.

This thing probably hasn't been powered on for fifteen or twenty years.

If it isn't vacuum-tube (valve) based, it really isn't ancient, and even
then if it dates from the late '60s or newer it really isn't ancient ;-).

Why would you worry about applying power to a 20 year-old monitor? For
*od's sake, that would have only have been 1987. A soft start using
a ferro-resonant isolation transformer or perhaps a continuous-duty
UPS would prevent transient or large inrush problems but I really wouldn't
worry too much ;-)

OTOH, if it has a round CRT and uses a 6BQ6 sweep tube, I'd use a variac.

Regards,

Michael