alt Hacker NewsWhen I was a child the front side displays on new Muni buses used to use these probably solonoid driven LED arrays. If you sat under one you could here this clattering sound that sounded kinda like rain each time the display changed. This discussion is bringing back old memories of those.
The older Breda trains and I think buses also used to use backlit paper rolls for signs: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/T_Third_... Those were significantly more readable
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Assuming you mean one of these guys:
https://cptdb.ca/wiki/images/6/60/San_Francisco_MUNI_8001-a....
https://cptdb.ca/wiki/index.php/File:San_Francisco_MUNI_8110...
The signs made quite a racket, but so did the buses (well, the first model I linked to).
Fun fact: When Muni first rolled out the digital signs on their newer Bredas the set the signs to rotate through three different pieces of information. So for 2/3 of the time you had no indication of where the train was headed.
Bonus fun fact: the cloth rolls have a variety of routes and destinations that never came to be.
They certainly did. The SFMTA also showed these to me and explained that not only were they extremely temperamental, but it also cost about $3k to print one of the curtains with the special barcode that prompts the curtains to rotate.