Not just big and heavy. Old monitors were deep. Corners were a great place to dump all that wasted depth.
I remember when we had lan parties back in the day and one of my friends who was an intern in a it firm could take one of their super nice monitors home. It was just as deep as a normal monitor and 19 inches i think, but it was somehow special or better because the screen itself wasn’t curved, it was straight. That thing was so heavy it almost broke my desk that i offered him. It was a two man operation to move that thing. i mean more of a two boy operation, it was still heavy as fuck.
Sounds like a Sony Trinitron to me. I had a 17" one for about a decade and it was equally magnificent and heavy. The largest one was 24" 16:10 widescreen.
https://aperturegrille.fandom.com/wiki/SONY_GDM-FW900
I wanted one so badly, but while these were finally somewhat affordable in 2010 (and still vastly superior to any flat-screen monitor), the shipping costs would have been ruinous.
God, I hated Trinitrons. We had them at work and while they had noticeably sharper images, my brain never could filter out the two horizontal wires that stabilized the grill.
I still don’t know why we got rid of these. They were space-efficient and made a computer room look great.