CRTs are peak steam punk technology. Analog, electric, kinda dangerous. Just totally mindblowing that we had these things in our living rooms shooting electric beams everywhere. I doubt it's environmentally friendly at all, but I'd love to see some new CRTs being made.
There's a synchronous and instantaneous nature you don't find in modern designs.
The image is not stored at any point. The receiver and the transmitter are part of the same electric circuit in a certain sense. It's a virtual circuit but the entire thing - transmitter and receiving unit alike - are oscillating in unison driven by a single clock.
The image is never entirely realized as a complete thing, either. While slow phosphor tubes do display a static image, most CRT systems used extremely fast phosphors; they release the majority of the light within a millisecond of the beam hitting them. If you take a really fast exposure of a CRT display (say 1/100,000th of a second) you don't see the whole image on the photograph - only the most recently few drawn lines glow. The image as a whole never exists at the same time. It exists only in the persistence of vision.
Just wanted to add one thing, not as a correction but just because I learned it recently and find it fascinating. PAL televisions (the color TV standard in Europe) actually do store one full horizontal scanline at a time, before any of it is drawn on the screen. This is due to a clever encoding used in this format where the TV actually needs to average two successive scan lines (phase-shifted compared to each other) to draw them. Supposedly this cancels out some forms of distortion. It is quite fascinating this was even possible with analogue technology. The line is stored in a delay line for 64 microseconds.
See e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsk4WWtRx6M
At some point, most NTSC TVs had delay lines, too. A comb filter was commonly used for separating the chroma from the luma, taking advantage of the chroma phase being flipped each line. Sophisticated comb filters would have multiple delay lines and logic to adaptively decide which to use. Some even delayed a whole field or frame, so you could say that in this case one or more frames were stored in the TV.
If a motion adaptive 3d comb filter (which requires comparing successive frames) was present on a TV, you can bet that it would be plastered all over the marketing material for the TV.
You can decode a PAL signal without any memory, the memory is only needed to correct for phase errors. In SECAM though, it's a hard requirement because the two color components, Db and Dr, are transmitted on alternating lines, and you need both on each line.
It doesn’t begin at the transmitter either, in the earliest days even the camera was essentially part of the same circuit. Yes, the concept of filming a show and showing the film over the air existed eventually, but before that (and even after that, for live programming) the camera would scan the subject image (actors, etc) line-by-line and down a wire to the transmitter which would send it straight to your TV and into the electron beam.
In fact in order to show a feed of only text/logos/etc in the earlier days, they would literally just point the camera at a physical object (like letters on a paper, etc) and broadcast from the camera directly. There wasn’t really any other way to do it.
Our station had an art department that used a hot press to create text boards that were set on an easel that had a camera pointed at it. By using a black background with white text you could merge the text camera with a camera in the studio and "super-imposed the text into the video feed.
"And if you tell the kids that today, they won't believe it!"
The very first computers (Manchester baby) used CRTs as memory - the ones and zeros were bright spots on a “mesh” and the electric charge on the mesh was read and resent back to the crt to keep the ram fresh (a sorta self refreshing ram)
Yes, but those were not the standard kind of CRTs that are used in TV sets and monitors.
The CRTs with memory for early computers were actually derived from the special CRTs used in video cameras. There the image formed by the projected light was converted in a distribution of charge stored on an electrode, which was then sensed by scanning with an electron beam.
Using CRTs as memory has been proposed by von Neumann and in his proposal he used the appropriate name for that kind of CRT: "iconoscope".
DRAM memories made with special CRTs with memory have been used for a few years, until 1954. For instance the first generation of commercial electronic computers made by IBM (scientific IBM 701 and business-oriented IBM 702) have used such CRTs.
Then the CRT memories have become obsolete almost instantaneously, due to the development of magnetic core memories, which did not require periodic refreshing and which were significantly faster. The fact that they were also non-volatile was convenient at that early time, though not essential.
Today, due to security concerns, you would actually not want for your main memory to be non-volatile, unless you also always encrypt it completely, which creates problems of secret key management.
So CRT memories have become obsolete several years before the replacement of vacuum tubes in computers with transistors, which happened around 1959/1960.
Besides CRT memories and delay line memories, another kind of early computer memory that has quickly become obsolete was the memory with magnetic drums.
In the cheapest early computers (like IBM 650), the main memory was not a RAM (i.e. neither a CRT nor with magnetic cores), but a magnetic drum memory (i.e. with sequential periodic access to data).
Yeah it super weird that while we struggle with latency in the digital world, storing anything for any amount of time is an almost impossible challenge in the analog world.
It's worth deep diving into how analog composite broadcast television works, because you quickly realize just how insanely ambitious it was for 1930s engineers to have not only conceived, but perfected and shipped at consumer scale using only 1930s technologies.
Being old enough to have learned video engineering at the end of the analog days, it's kind of fun helping young engineers today wrap their brains around completely alien concepts, like "the image is never pixels" then "it's never digital" and "never quantized." Those who've been raised in a digital world learn to understand things from a fundamentally digital frame of reference. Even analog signals are often reasoned about as if their quantized form was their "true nature".
Interestingly, I suspect the converse would be equally true trying to explain digital television to a 1930s video engineer. They'd probably struggle similarly, always mentally remapping digital images to their "true" analog nature. The fundamental nature of their world was analog. Nothing was quantized. Even the idea "quanta" might be at the root of physics was newfangled, suspect and, even if true, of no practical use in engineering systems.
Yes agreed! And while it is not quantized as such there is an element of semi-digital protocol to it. The concept of "scanline" is quantized and there's "protocols" for indicating when a line ends, and a picture ends etc. that the receiver/send needs to agree on... and "colorbursts packets" for line, delay lines and all kinds of clever technique etc. so it is extremely complicated. Many things were necessary to overcome distortion and also to ensure backwards compatibility - first, how do you fit in the color so a monochrome TV can still show it? Later, how do you make it 16:9 and it can still show on a 4:3 TV (which it could!).
> And while it is not quantized as such there is an element of semi-digital protocol to it.
Yes, before posting I did debate that exact point in my head, with scanlines as the clearest example :-). However, I decided the point is still directionally valid because ultimately most timing-centric analog signal encoding has some aspect of being quantized, if only to thresholds. Technically it would be more correct to narrow my statement about "never quantized" to the analog waveform driving the electron gun as it sweeps horizontally across a line. It always amazes digital-centric engineers weaned on pixels when they realize the timing of the electron gun sweep in every viewer's analog TV was literally created by the crystal driving the sweep of the 'master' camera in the TV studio (and would drift in phase with that crystal as it warmed up!). It's the inevitable consequence of there being no practical way to store or buffer such a high frequency signal for re-timing. Every component in the chain from the cameras to switchers to transmitters to TVs had to lock to the master clock. Live TV in those days was truly "live" to within 63.5 microseconds of photons hitting vacuum tubes in the camera (plus the time time it took for the electrons to move from here to there). Today, "live" HDTV signals are so digitally buffered, re-timed and re-encoded at every step on their way to us, we're lucky if they're within 20 seconds of photons striking imagers.
My larger point though was that in the 1930s even that strict signal timing had to be encoded and decoded purely with discrete analog components. I have a 1950s Predicta television and looking at the components on the boards one can't help wondering "how the hell did they come up with this crazy scheme." Driving home just how bonkers the whole idea of analog composite television was for the time.
> first, how do you fit in the color so a monochrome TV can still show it?
To clarify for anyone who may not know, analog television was created in the 1930s as a black-and-white composite standard defined by the EIA in the RS-170 specification, then in 1953 color was added by a very clever hack which kept all broadcasts backward compatible with existing B&W TVs (defined in the RS-170A specification). Politicians mandated this because they feared nerfing all the B&W TVs owned by voters. But that hack came with some significant technical compromises which complicated and degraded color analog video for over 50 years.
Yes knew what you meant, and fully agree. It is fascinating TV is even possible just out of all these rather simple and bulky analog components. Even the first color TV's were with vacuum tubes and no transitors.
As I recall there's all kinds of hacks in the design to keep them cheap. For instance, letting the fly-back transformer for producing the high voltages needed operate at the same frequency as the horizontal scan rate (~15 kHz) so that mechanism essentially serves double duty. The same was even seen in microcomputers where the same crystal needed for TV was also used for the microprocessor - meaning that e.g. a "European" Commodore 64 with PAL was actually a few percent slower than an American C64 with NTSC. And other crazy things like that.
> "European" Commodore 64 with PAL was actually a few percent slower than an American C64 with NTSC. And other crazy things like that.
Indeed! Even in the Playstation 2 era, many games still ran at different speeds in Europe than the U.S. and Japan. There were so many legacy artifacts which haunted computers, games, DVDs and more for decades after analog broadcast was supplanted by digital. And it all arose from the fact the installed base and supporting broadcast infrastructure of analog television was simply too massive to replace. In a way it was one of the biggest accrued "technical debts" ever!
The only regrettable thing is during the long, painful transition from analog to digital, a generation of engineers got the idea that the original analog TV standard was somehow bad - which, IMHO, is really unfair. The reality is the original RS-170 standard was a brilliant solution which perfectly fulfilled, and even exceeded, all its intended use cases for decades. The problems only arose when that solution was kept alive far beyond its intended lifetime and then hacked to support new use cases like color encoding while maintaining backward compatibility.
Analog television was created solely for natural images captured on vacuum tube cameras. Even the concept of synthetic imagery like character generator text and computer graphic charts was still decades in the future. Then people who weren't yet born when TV was created, began to shove poorly converted, hard-edged, low-res, digital imagery into a standard created to gracefully degrade smooth analog waveforms and it indeed sucked. I learned to program on an 8-bit computer with 4K of RAM connected to a Sears television through an RF modulator. Even 32 columns of 256x192 text was a blurry mess with color fringes! On many early 8-bit computers, some colors would invert randomly based on which clock phase the computer started on! Red would be blue and vice versa so we'd have to repeatedly hit reset until the colors looked correct. But none of that craziness was the fault of the original television engineers, we were abusing what they created in ways they couldn't have imagined.
It's interesting how early digital video systems were influenced by the analog aspects. DVDs were very much still defined by NTSC/PAL even though the data is fully digital.
Indeed and even today's HDTV specification has elements based on echoes reverberating all the way from decisions made in the 1930s when specifying B&W TV.
The composite and component sampling rates (14.32 MHz and 13.5 MHz) are both based on being 4x a specific existing color carrier sampling rate from analog television. And those two frequencies directly dictated all the odd-seeming horizontal pixel resolutions we find in pre-HD digital video (352, 704, 360, 720 and 768) and even the original PC display resolutions (CGA, VGA, XGA, etc).
For example, the 720 horizontal pixels of DVD and digital satellite broadcasts was tied to the digital component video standard sampling the active picture area of an analog video scanline at 13.5 Mhz to capture the 1440 clock transitions in that waveform. Similarly, 768 (another common horizontal resolution in pre-HD video) is tied to the composite video standard sampling at 14.32 MHz to capture 1536 clock transitions. The history of how these standards were derived is fascinating (https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_304-rec601_wood.pdf)
VGA's horizontal resolution of 640 is simply from adjusting analog video's rectangular aspect ratio to be square (720 * 0.909 = 640). It's kind of fascinating all these modern digital resolutions can be traced back to decisions made in the 1930s based on which affordable analog components were available, which competing commercial interests prevailed (RCA vs Philco) and the political sensitivities present at the time.
I was on a course at Sony in San Mateo in the 1980s and they had a 36" prototype television in the corner. We all asked for it to be turned on. We were told by the instructor that he was not allowed to turn it on because the 40,000V anode voltage generated too many X-rays at the front of the picture tube.
What do you mean "had"? I just turned mine off a minute ago. I am yet to make the transition to flat screen TVs but in the mean time, at least no-one's tracking my consumer habits.
Extra dangerous aspect:
On really early CRTs they hadn't quite nailed the glass thicknesses. One failure mode was that the neck that held the electron gun would fail. This would propell the gun through the front of the screen, possibly toward the viewer.
Likewise, a dropped CRT tube was a constant terror for TV manufacturing and repair folks, as it likely would implode and send zillions of razor-sharp fragments airborne.
Touching one of those caps was a hell of an experience. It was similar in many ways to a squirrel tap with a wrench in the auto shop (for those who didn't do auto shop, a squirrel tap with a wrench is when somebody flicks your nut sack from behind with a wrench. Properly executed it would leave you doubled over out of breath).
I remember smashing a broken monitor as a kid for fun, hearing about the implosion stuff, and sadly found the back of the glass was stuck to some kind of plastic film that didnt allow the pieces to fly about :(
"I still have a piece of glass in back of the palm of my right hand. Threw a rock at an old CRT and it exploded, after a couple of hours I noticed a little blood coming out of that part of hand. Many, many years later was doing xray for a broken finger and doctor asked what is that object doing there? I shrugged, doc said, well it looks like it's doing just fine, so might as well stay there. How lucky I am to have both eyes."
"2. Throwing a big big stone to an abandoned next to the trashcan CRT TV while I had it placed normally because it didn’t break when I threw it facing up and the next thing I remember after opening my eyes which I closed from the bang was my friends who were further down the road looking at me as it I were a ghost since big big chunks for the CRT glass flew just right next to me.
"I'll never forget the feeling of the whoosh when I was working as a furniture mover in the early 2000s and felt the implosion when a cardboard box collapsed and dumped a large CRT TV face-down on the driveway, blowing our hair back. When the boss asked what happened to the TV, I said it fell, and our lead man (who had set it on the box) later thanked me for putting it so diplomatically."
The ''tube'' was indeed extrememly fragile and thus extremely dangerous. I'm talking about only the unguarded ''tube'' itself. Repair and manufacturer technicians had to deal with that on a regular basis. Later, consumer protection laws and other standards came into effect that made TV and monitor superstructures more capable of guarding such a dangerous internal component. Your experience was clearly with those much safer, later types.
While not entirely thematically unrelated, being electric puts it distinctly outside of steampunk and even dieselpunk. I don't think anyone would call The Matrix steampunk but CRTs are at the center of its aesthetic. Cassette Futurism is the correct term I believe though it also overlaps with some sub-genres of cyberpunk.
Yes - and x-rays too! Both from the main TV tube itself (though often shielded) but historically the main problem was actually the vacuum rectifiers used to generate the high voltages required. Those vacuum tubes essentially became x-ray bulbs and had to be shielded. This problem appeared as the first color TV's appeared in the late 60s. Color required higher voltages for the same brightness, due to the introduction of a mask that absorbed a lot of the energy. As a famous example, certain GE TV's would emit a strong beam of x-rays, but it was downwards so it would mostly expose someone beneath the TV. Reportedly a few models could emit 50,000 mR/hr at 9 inches distance https://www.nytimes.com/1967/07/22/archives/owners-of-9000-c... which is actually quite a lot (enough for radiation sickness after a few hours). All were recalled of course!
With CRTs, the environmental problem is the heavy metals: tons of lead in the glass screen, plus cadmium and whatnot. Supposedly there can be many pounds of lead in a large CRT.
Actually, the voltages had to be raised due to the shadow mask, and this rise in voltage meant you were now in x-ray territory, which wasn't the case before. The infamous problems with TV's emitting x-rays and associate recalls were the early color TV's. And it wasn't so much from the tube, but from the shunt regulators etc. in the power supply that were themselves vacuum tubes. If you removed the protection cans around those you would be exposed to strong radiation. Most of that went away when the TV's were transistorized so the high-voltage circuits didn't involve vacuum tubes.
Most of those old TVs were not Faraday Caged either, nor were they grounded to earth, so all that radiation and energy was one hardware failure away from seriously unfunny events. Their chassis grounding always gave a tingle to the touch.
The 1940-1990 era of technology can't be beat. Add hard drives and tape to the mix. What happened to electromechanical design? I doubt it would be taught anymore. Everything is solid state
Solid state is the superior technology for almost everything. No moving parts means more reliable, quieter, and very likely more energy efficient since no mass has to move.
Do modern hdd's last as long as the old platter ones? For me, when the SSDs fail it's frustrating because I can't open it up and do anything about it--it's a complete loss. So I tend to have a low opinion of their reliability (same issue I have with old versus new electronic-everything cars). I don't know the actual lifetimes. Surely USB sticks are universally recognized as pretty crappy. I can leave those in the same location plugged in and they'll randomly die after a couple of years.
I feel like I'm the only person in the world who never had an issue with USB flash drives. Or HDDs for that matter. Or SSDs. I don't think I've ever had any storage die on me except optical disks.
Internet says both HDDs and SSDs have similar average lifespans, but with HDDs it's usually a mechanical failure so yes, you can often DIY it back to life if you have the right parts. With SSDs it's almost always the memory cells themselves wearing out. On the flip side, data recovery is usually much easier since SSD will usually keep working in read-only mode for a while, whereas a faulty HDD won't work at all.
That and modern digital TV is just incredibly boring from the technical standpoint. Because everything is a computer these days, it's just some MPEG-2 video. The only thing impressive about it is that they managed to squeeze multiple channels worth of video streams into the bandwidth of one analog channel.
Also, I believe precursors to CRT existed in the 19th century. What was unique with television was the creation of a full CRT system that allowed moving picture consumption to be a mass phenomena.
We're getting awfully close to recreating CRT qualities with modern display panels. A curved 4:3 1000Hz OLED panel behind glass, and an integrated RetroTink 4K with G-Sync Pulsar support would do it. Then add in a simulated degauss effect and electrical whine and buzzing sounds for fun.
Why curved? We didn't like the CRT curvature back then and manufacturers struggled to make them as flat as possible, finally reaching "virtually flat" screens towards the end of the CRT era. I have one right here on my desk, a Sony Multiscan E200.
This thread makes me realise that the old Telequipment D61 Cathode Ray Oscilloscope I have is worth hanging on to. It's basically a CRT with signal conditioning on its inputs, including a "Z mod" input, making it easy to do cool stuff with it.
"Dieselpunk" is sometimes considered the next door neighbor term for WW1 through early 1950's retrofuturism with electricity and radios/very early televisions.
Sometimes people use "Steampunk" for shorthand for both because there are some overlaps in either direction, especially if you are trying for "just" pre-WWI retrofuture. Though I think the above poster was maybe especially trying to highlight the sort of pre-WWI overlap with Steampunk with more electricity but not yet as many cars and "diesel".
I don't know. Steam and electricity seem more like a coincidence that they were developed at the same time, so worlds without one seem natural. Another possibility might be no semiconductors. No nuclear also feels plausible, but it's just not interesting. Anything else requires a massive stretch to explain why technology got stuck in such a state.
Perhaps, if you are worried about realism from the perspective of modern technology. But a lot of the concept of retrofuturism is considering the possible futures from the perspectives of the past. You don't necessarily need realism for why you would consider an exercise like that.
Steampunk is "rootable" in the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and others. We have scifi visions from Victorian and Edwardian lenses. It wasn't needed at the time to explain how you steam power a submarine or a rocket ship, it was just extrapolating "if this goes on" of quick advances in steam power and expecting them to eventually get there.
Similar with a lot of Diselpunk. The 1930s through the 1950s are often referred to as the Golden Age of scifi. There's so much science fiction written in the real world with a zeal for possible futures that never happened. We don't necessarily need a "massive stretch" to explain why technology took a different path or "got stuck" at a particular point. We've plenty of ideas of the exuberance of that era just in the books that they wrote and published themselves.
(Not that we are lacking in literary means to create excuses for the "realism" of retrofuture, either, when we care to. For one obvious instance, the Fallout franchise's nuclear warfare is central to its dieselpunk setting and an obvious reason for technology to get "stuck". For one less obvious reason, I like "For All Mankind" and its "Apollopunk" setting using the excuse of Russia beating the United States to first boots on the Moon and the butterfly impacts that could have had.)
I mean that steampunk looks plausible, because it indeed seems to be purely a historical coincidence that electricity was developed at the same time. They are unrelated, one doesn't follow from the other in any way, so there is no obvious need to have both.
You pretty much need to have both chemistry and electricity, or neither.
Even Jules Verne understood the impossibility (or at least absurd impracticality) of a steam powered submarine, and made Nautilus electric.
It's unclear if internal combustion engines would be developed without electricity, and to what degree they would become practical.
I'm not sure about semiconductors, but the discovery does seem fairly random, and it seems plausible that electronics could just go on with vacuum tubes.
It seems perfectly plausible that nuclear wasn't noticed or practically developed, but, as I said, it just isn't an interesting setting.
I saw TV first time in 1957. Finland had no TV transmitters, so programs came from Soviet Estonia. I distinctly remember watching romantic Russian film with a catching tune. Perhaps named "Moscow Lights"?
How this is even possible that I remember all this, because I was 4 yrs old?
Gemini knows:
The Film: In the Days of the Spartakiad (1956/1957)
The song "Moscow Nights" was originally written for a documentary film called "In the Days of the Spartakiad" (V dni spartakiady), which chronicled a massive Soviet sports competition.
The Scene: In the film, there is a romantic, quiet scene where athletes are resting in the countryside near Moscow at night.
The Music: The song was sung by Vladimir Troshin. It was intended to be background music, but it was so hauntingly melodic that it became an overnight sensation across the USSR and its neighbors.
The Finnish Connection: In 1957, the song became a massive hit in Finland and Estonia. Since you were watching Estonian TV, you likely saw a version where the dialogue or narration was dubbed into Finnish—a common practice for broadcasts intended for Finnish-speaking audiences across the Gulf of Finland.
I actually thought that the "Computer" was some kind of abstract construct in 1971. And "programs" were just a method of expressing algorithms in textual manner. Only when we were allowed to have brief interactions with Teletype, did I believe there was actual machine that understands and executes these complex commands. Mind Blown.
I easily have many memories from age 4. I think I even remember the first time that I started forming memories. It was a few years before that, I had come out of my room and saw some toys I was playing with the night before. I realized they were at the same spot I left them, which made me realize the world had permanence and my awareness had continuity. I could leave things at a certain spot and they would be there the next day, that I could build things and they would stay that way. I realized I could remember things, in a way like "homo sapiens sapiens" being thinking about thinking, I realized I remember that I could remember.
This is a fascinating post but I don't believe it reflects (most) human memory development, which has a pronounced forgetting phase called 'childhood amnesia'. When your kid starts to talk, it's startling what a two-year-old can remember and can tell you about. And it's kinda heartbreaking when they're 4-5 and you realise that those early memories have faded.
Note that your memories might not be accurate, as your brain may have skightly altered them over the years, over and over. There is generally no way for yourself to know (except for some external proof).
This is not just the case for early childhood memories, but for anything - the more time passes, the less accurate. It's even possible to have completely "made-up" memories, perceived as 100% real, e.g. through suggestive questioning in therapy.
Definitely have some memories from 3 years old - some people claim earlier and I wouldn't doubt that, although it's very rare for memories before 2 to be recalled episodically.
It's also hard to be sure if early memories are actually memories from the actual event or are memories your brain constructed from later hearing people describe the event.
There was one experiment where researchers got a man's family at a holiday gathering of the extended family to start talking about funny things that had happened to family members when they were children. In particular the man's parents and siblings told about a funny incident that happened to the man during his 3rd grade school play.
The man had earlier agreed to participate in some upcoming psychological research but did not yet know the details or been told when the research would start.
Later he was contacted and told the research would be starting soon, and asked to come in an answer some background questions. They asked about early non-academic school activities and he told them about his 3rd grade play and the funny incident that happened, including details that his family had not mentioned.
Unbeknownst to the man the research had actually started earlier and the man's family had agreed to help out. That story about the 3rd grade play that his family told was actually given to them by the researchers. None of his elementary school classes had put on any plays.
This sort of thing can be a real problem. People being questioned about crimes (as witnesses or suspects) can get false memories of the crime if the person questioning them is not careful. Or worse, a questioner could intentionally get them to form false memories that they will later recall on the witness stand.
The memories are probably nothing like how they were at the time, but I vividly remember running away from my parents with my elder sister, getting bullied by an extremely blond girl at day care, and falling and literally eating dirt including that it was salty around 2-3.
But at some point don't you lose the direct memory, and only retain remembering it? Eg I don't know that I directly remember the fight I got in with the neighbor kid at age 4, but I can definitely remember thinking about it for a something we had to write in school around age 8. Or at least I could when I was in high school. That's when I thought about the time I had to write that essay when I was 8. At some point all I remember are the like the layers of subsequent thoughts about the original event, and I don't really access the original event any more, or it's just a stub.
At some point, most memories are like that, to be honest – not just early childhood ones. You could say I consider these are "vivid" because I can recall more details of them than of the average memory.
I have one memory that I can place between late 2 and early 3: my mum telling me I was going to have a brother. When he was born, I was 3 years and 6 months old.
My first memory of TV (but not my earliest memory by far) was, at age 4, seeing the first Space Shuttle launch. It was live on a little black-and-white set my parents had in their bedroom.
For what it’s worth, Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird were friendly with each other. I was lucky to know Philo’s wife Pem very well in the last part of her life, and she spoke highly of Baird as a person.
David Sarnoff and RCA was an entirely different matter, of course…
One of his electro-mechanical units was on display in Victoria, Australia. Most amazing assemblage, you can sort-of get the idea from things.
I read online that at his end, Baird was proposing a TV scan-rate we'd class as HD quality, which lost out to a 405 line standard (which proceeded 625/colour)
There is also a quality of persistence in his approach to things, he was the kind of inventor who doesn't stop inventing.
Whatever we all television now, television then was literally "vision at a distance", which Baird was the first to demonstrate (AFAIK).
The TV I have now in my living room is closer to a computer than a television from when I grew up (born 1975) anyway, so the word could mean all sorts of things. I mean, we still call our pocket computers "phones" even though they are mainly used for viewing cats at a distance.
You should read about the invention of color television. There were two competing methods, one of which depended on a spinning wheel with colored filters in it. If I remember correctly, you needed something like a 10-foot wheel to have a 27-inch TV.
Sure enough, this was the system selected as the winner by the U.S. standard-setting body at the time. Needless to say, it failed and was replaced by what we ended up with... which still sucked because of the horrible decision to go to a non-integer frame rate. Incredibly, we are for some reason still plagued by 29.97 FPS long after the analog system that required it was shut off.
Originally you had 30fps, it was the addition of colour with the NTSC system that dropped it to 30000/1001fps. That wasn't a decision taken lightly -- it was a consequence of retrofitting colour onto a black and white system while maintaining backward compatibility.
When the UK (and Europe) went colour it changed to a whole new system and didn't have to worry too much about backward compatibility. It had a higher bandwidth (8mhz - so 33% more than NTSC), and was broadcasting on new channels separate to the original 405 lines. It also had features like alternating the phase of every other line to reduce the "tint" or "never twice the same color" problem that NTSC had
America chose 30fps but then had to slow it by 1/1001ths to avoid interference.
Of course because by the 90s and the growth of digital, there was already far too much stuff expecting "29.97"hz so it remained, again for backward compatibility.
In the UK the two earliest channels (BBC1 and ITV) continued to broadcast in the 405 line format (in addition to PAL) until 1985. Owners of ancient televisions had 20 years to upgrade. That doesn't seem unreasonable.
An engineer at RCA in New Jersey told me that at the first(early) NTSC color demo the interference was corrected by hand tweaking the color sub-carrier oscillator from which vertical and horizontal intervals were derived and the final result was what we got.
The interference was caused when the spectrum of the color sub-carrier over-lapped the spectrum of the horizontal interval in the broadcast signal.
Tweaking the frequencies allowed the two spectra to interleave in the frequency domain.
understanding the affect of the 1.001 fix has given me tons of job security. That understanding came not from just book learning, but OJT from working in a film/video post house that had engineers, colorists, and editors that were all willing to entertain a young college kid's constant use of "why?". Then being present for the transition from editing film on flat beds to editing film transfers to video. Part of that came from having to transfer audio from tape reels to video by changing to the proper 59.94Hz or 60Hz crystal that was needed to control the player's speed. Also had a studio DAT deck that could slow down the 24fps audio record in the field to playback at 23.976.
Literally, to this day, am I dealing with all of these decisions made ~100 years ago. The 1.001 math is a bit younger when color was rolled out, but what's a little rounding between friends?
For one thing, it’s much easier to measure spans of time when you have an integer frame rate. For example, 1 hour at 30fps is exactly 108,000 frames, but at 29.97 it’s only 107,892 frames. Since frame numbers must all have an integer time code, “drop-frame” time code is used, where each second has a variable number of frames so that by the end of each measured hour the total elapsed time syncs up with the time code, i.e. “01:00:00;00” falls after exactly one hour has passed. This is of course crucial when scheduling programs, advertisements, and so on. It’s a confusing mess and historically has caused all kinds of headaches for the TV industry over the years.
I had a communications theory class in college that addressed "vestigal sideband modulation," which I believe was implemented by Farnsworth. I think this is a critical aspect to the introduction of television technology.
In the United States in 1935, the Radio Corporation of America demonstrated a 343-line television system. In 1936, two committees of the Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), which is now known as the Consumer Electronics Association, proposed that U.S. television channels be standardized at a bandwidth of 6 MHz, and recommended a 441-line, interlaced, 30 frame-per-second television system. The RF modulation system proposed in this recommendation used double-sideband, amplitude-modulated transmission, limiting the video bandwidth it was capable of carrying to 2.5 MHz. In 1938, this RMA proposal was amended to employ vestigial-sideband (VSB) transmission instead of double sideband. In the vestigial-sideband approach, only the upper sidebands-those above the carrier frequency-plus a small segment or vestige of the lower sidebands, are transmitted. VSB raised the transmitted video bandwidth capability to 4.2 MHz. Subsequently, in 1941, the first National Television Systems Committee adopted the vestigial sideband system using a total line rate of 525 lines that is used in the United States today.
The thing is that "television" seemed like a thing but really it was a system that required a variety of connected, compatible parts, like the Internet.
Different pieces of what became TV existed in 1900, the challenge was putting them together. And that required a consensus among powerful players.
I think it would be pretty uncontroversial from the technological point of view, but then, the first "real" TV broadcast would be the 1936 Olympic games...
You're skipping a few steps (like the Altair 8800) if you say that Apple invented the PC as we know it. Apple didn't even invent the GUI as we know it.
Philo Farnsworth invented the cathode ray tube. unless you're writing this from the year 2009 or before, I'm going to have to push back on the idea that tv's TODAY are based on his technology. They most certainly are not.
'Although he failed to gain much recognition in the West, he built the world's first all-electronic television receiver, and is referred to as "the father of Japanese television"'
And 100 years ago my great-aunt and grandmother (both RIP) were little kids and my great-grandmother, born in the 19th century and which I knew very well for she lived until 99 years old, was filming them playing on the beach using a "Pathe Baby" hand camera.
And we converted some of these reels to digital files (well brothers and I asked a specialized company to "digitalize" them).
100 years ago people already had cars, tramways (as a kid my great-grandmother tried to look under the first tramway she saw to see "where the horses were hiding"), cameras to film movies, telephones, the telegraph existed, you could trade the stock market and, well, it's knew to me but TV was just invented too.
On the one hand, it's fascinating to know just how much of what shapes our lives was already there a hundred years ago in some form.
On the other hand, it's just as fascinating to realize that all that, and ~everything that shapes modern life, did not exist until ~200 years ago. Not just appliances, but medicines and medicine, plastics and greases and other products of petrochemical industry and everything built on top of it, paints and cleaners and materials and so on...
In a way television was kind of cool. I loved it as a child, give or take.
Nowadays ..... hmmm. I no longer own a TV since many years. Sadly youtube
kind of replaced television. It is not the same, quality-wise I think
youtube is actually worse than e. g. the 1980s era. But I also don't
really want to go back to television, as it also had low quality - and
it simply took longer, too. On youtube I was recently watching old
"Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst", in german. The old videos are kind of cool
and interesting from the 1980s. I watched the new ones - it no longer
made ANY sense to watch it ... the quality is much worse, and it is
also much more boring. It's strange.
I remember when we organized our lives around television. On Saturday mornings it would be cartoons (including the first full-CGI television shows, Reboot and Transformers: Beast Wars), Wednesday evenings would be Star Trek: TNG, Fridays would be the TGIF block of family shows (from early-to-mid-90s USA perspective here). It felt like everyone watched the same thing, everyone had something to talk about from last night's episode, and there was a common connection over what we watched as entertainment.
We saw a resurgence of this connection with big-budget serials like Game of Thrones, but now every streaming service has their own must-watch thing and it's basically as if everyone had their own personal broadcast station showing something different. I don't know if old-school television was healthy for society or not, but I do have a feeling of missing out on that shared connection lately.
> but I do have a feeling of missing out on that shared connection lately
Mass media isolates individuals who don't have access to it. I grew up without a TV, and when TV was all my neighbors could talk about, I was left out, and everyone knew it.
While other children were in front of the television gaining "shared experience", I built forts in the woods with my siblings, explored the creek in home made boats, learned to solder, read old books, wrote basic computer programs, launched model rockets, made up magic tricks. I had a great childhood, but I had a difficult time connecting with children whose only experiences were these shallow, shared experiences.
Now that media is no longer "shared", the fragmented content that people still consume has diminishing social value -- which in many cases was the only value it had. Which means there are fewer social consequences for people like me who choose not to partake.
Mass media even moreso isolates individuals who DO have access to it.
Their "shared experience" is, actually, a debilitating addiction to flat, untouchable, and anti-democratic spectacle.
The least hundred years have seen our society drained of social capital, inescapably enthralled by corporate mediators. Mass media encourages a shift from "doing" to "watching." As we consume hand-tailored entertainment in private, we retreat from the public square.
Heavy television consumption is associated with lethargy and passivity, reinforcing an intolerance for unstructured time. This creates a "pseudoworld" where viewers feel a false sense of companionship—a parasocial connection with television personalities—that creates a feeling of intimacy while requiring (and offering) no actual reciprocity or effort.
Television, the "800-pound gorilla of leisure time," has privatized our existence. This privatization of leisure acts as a lethal competitor for scarce time, stealing hours that were once devoted to social interaction—the picnics, club meetings, and informal visiting that constitute the mētis or practical social knowledge of community life.
it feels like you're advocating that "unless everybody can form a shared connection through common culture, nobody should for a shared connection through common culture".
This is something I've been lamenting for a long time. The lack of shared culture. Sometimes a mega-hit briefly coalesces us, but for the most part everyone has their own thing.
I miss the days when everyone had seen the same thing I had.
I found this the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksFhXFuRblg "NBC Nightly News, June 24, 1975" I strongly urge people to watch this, it's 30 minutes but there are many very illuminating insights within. One word for you: Exxon.
While I was young in 1975, I did watch ABC's version of the news with my grandparents, and continued up through high school. Then in the late 1980s I got on the Internet and well you know the rest.
"Back Then", a high percentage of everybody I or my grandparents or my friends came into contact with watched one of ABC, NBC, or CBS news most nights. These three networks were a bit different, but they generally they all told the same basic stories as each other.
This was effectively our shared reality. Later in high school as I became more politically focused, I could still talk to anybody, even people who had completely opposite political views as myself. That's because we had a shared view of reality.
Today, tens of millions of people see the exact same footage of an officer involved shooting...many angles, and draw entirely different 'factual' conclusions.
So yes, 50 years ago, we in the United States generally had a share view of reality. That was good in a lot of ways, but it did essentially allow a small set of people in power to decide that convincing a non-trivial percentage of the US population that Exxon was a friendly, family oriented company that was really on your side.
Worth the trade off? Hard to say, but at least 'back then' it was possible, and even common, to have ground political discussions with people 'on the other side', and that's pretty valuable.
> 'back then' it was possible, and even common, to have ground political discussions with people 'on the other side'
As long as that common ground falls within acceptable parameters; couldn't talk too much about anything remotely socialist or being anti-war.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
I don't know if it's good or bad but, outside of some megahit films, people mostly don't regularly watch the same TV series. I don't even have live TV myself.
i hate the single season dumping at once for a big binge. it always feel like i'm plugging into the content trough and gorging myself to pass the hours.
you can't talk about a show with somebody until they're also done binging, so there's no fun discussion/speculation (the conversation is either "did you watch that? yeah. <conversation over>" or "you should watch this. <conversation over>".
The broadcast nature of it is something that I missed just last night. I was walking past several bars as the Seahawks won a big football game, but of course each spot was on a different stream delay so instead of one full-throated simultaneous cheer echoing across the neighborhood it was three or four quieter, distinct cheers spread over 20-30 seconds. Not really a big deal but still, it felt like a lesser experience to this aging millennial.
> It is not the same, quality-wise I think youtube is actually worse than e. g. the 1980s era
Is it though? I of course watched TV as a kid through the 80s and have some feelings of nostalgia about it, but is it true that YouTube today is worse?
I mean, YouTube is nothing in particular. There's all sorts of crap, but Sturgeon's Law [1] applies here. There is also good stuff, even gems, if you curate your content carefully. YouTube can be delightful if you know what to look for. If you don't filter, yeah... it's garbage.
There is many times more things on youtube than were ever on TV over it's entire lifetime up to the YT era, even discounting old TV show content on Youtube. But it also feels like the ratio of of good-to-shit has not remained constant between the two.
Definitely good stuff on YouTube, but I do miss the curation and, as was talked about here recently I believe, shared experiences that brought. I'm also crazy addicted to YouTube in a way that I wasn't to TV, but that's another issue.
Same as reddit pretty much. 98% is trash but good parts do exist.
Diving into new topics on YT is delightful.
The site becomes much better with sponsorblock+ublock origin+hide shorts/trending (unhook or blocktube)+replace clickbait titles+replace thumbnails (dearrow)+return youtube dislike.
I've sometimes wondered how things would have been different if the TV pioneers had went with circular CRTs instead of rounded rectangles.
Circles would have had a couple of advantages. First, I believe they would have been easier to make. From what I've read rectangles have more stress at the corners. Rounding the corners reduces that but it is still more than circles have. With circles they could have more easily made bigger CRTs.
Second, there is no aspect ratio thus avoiding the whole problem of picking an aspect ratio.
Electronically the signals to the XY deflectors to scan a spiral out from the center (or in from the edge if you prefer) on a circle are as easy to make as the signals to to scan in horizontal lines on a rectangle.
As far as I can tell that would have been fine up until we got computers and wanted to use TV CRTs as computer displays. I can't imagine how to build a bitmapped interface for such a CRT that would not be a complete nightmare to deal with.
I would guess that even at the time a circular viewport would have seemed a bit weird and so rectangular was preferred. After all, theater stages, most windows, photographs and books - all common place - aren’t circular either.
Reminds me of how every single piece of paper on Battlestar Galactica has the corners cut off. Somewhere in their timeline paper became 8 sided, and it's just as odd as our 4 side paper and rectangular TVs
The issue is not so much that you can't pack them at all but any packing solution is going to waste a lot of space in the truck compared to a bunch of box shaped TVs.
> In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence.
And modern America asked itself, why can't it be both?
For example, page 26 has directions on how to pop by the local chemist to pick up materials to make your own selenium cell (your first imager) and page 29 covers constructing your first Televisor, including helpful tips like "A very suitable tin-plate is ... the same material out of which biscuit tins and similar light tinware is made. It is easily handled and can readily be cut with an ordinary pair of scissors. It is sold in sheets of 22 inches by 30 inches. Any ironmonger will supply these."
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is the book that comes to mind with this article link. 2 years ago my wife and I took the TV off the wall. My kids don't have Bluey or the latest Disney cartoon to keep them company. I am not going back... It has been the most blissful time. Amazing that the TV is not required to lead a thriving life despite what the incessant sales-industrial-complex will tell you.
The Baird vs Farnsworth debate reminds me of similar discussions in tech. The first demo rarely becomes the dominant standard.
What strikes me is how fast the iteration was. Baird went from hatboxes and bicycle lenses to color TV prototypes in just two years. That's the kind of rapid experimentation we're seeing with AI right now, though compressed even further.
Does anyone here still have television? Ever since I moved out of my parents house (15 years ago), I never had a TV subscription. I did own a TV screen, but only to run apps like Netflix and Youtube. I'd rather have a simple monitor without the TV options to do so, but strangely that never existed or was too expensive.
Edit: to make it clear, I absolutely did not miss having TV for even a second in all of those years.
I am not really sure what you mean by "have television" - I, as I assume many here, have a TV "screen" as you put it, but it's used for Apple TV apps, home media server viewing, Netflix, and video games. I actually do have a digital antenna with it but never use it. I think the only time I have in the last 10 years or so was to watch one olympic event last summer.
Over here in some European countries TV license fee is mandatory even if you don't own a set. The licence funds watchable content, so it makes sense to have one. (I kind-of pity the US and other countries without a strong public TV system). Actually I have access to three TV markets via satellite (which includes UK with the BBC) and the amount of good content free to receive and record it much better than what Netflix offers. (Of course, nothing can match youtube)
BTW, I also still have a CRT in constant use - but the sources are now digital (It's my kitchen background TV - I feed it from a Raspberry PI with Kodi). On great thing about CRTs is that there's no computer inside monitoring what you watch.
If everyone agreed with that you wouldn't have to force them to pay the license and could sell subscriptions instead.
> I kind-of pity the US and other countries without a strong public TV system
I don't. At least they don't have to pay for their propaganda.
> Actually I have access to three TV markets via satellite (which includes UK with the BBC) and the amount of good content free to receive and record it much better than what Netflix offers.
That's like saying dumpster diving gets you better food than the sewers.
> On great thing about CRTs is that there's no computer inside monitoring what you watch.
Weird tangent when there are plenty of computer monitors based on non-CRT technologies. If CRTs were still being made today they wouldn't have any less anti-features.
I have some sort of old flat screen TV, which I bought before there were "smart" TVs. But I don't have cable or over-the-air reception. Instead I have a Roku soundbar with Netflix, Apple TV+, and Youtube apps (plus some other apps that I don't use, like Tubi and Pluto). I haven't had cable or over-the-air reception for ~18 years.
I can't watch anything live unless Youtube is showing some live event (which it sometimes does). I could probably watch some live news using Pluto, but I never do.
My mom still pays for cable, so since I live with her I suppose I have it by proxy. When I move out I'll still be buying one of those digital OTA antennas because I don't watch enough tv to justify a streaming service or cable, and sometimes it's nice to just watch something that's on without much of a choice
Kept a few mini portable CRTs. I don't have any CRT monitors though.. sold my beloved diamondtron to a movie editor, sadly transporter probably shook it too hard and the device wasn't operating on arrival (at to refund the guy and lose the screen, double whammy)
I have a device marketed as a TV which I use to watch movies as well as serial entertainment that was originally released on television. I don't use any kind of broadcast, cable or streaming service though.
The device? Absolutely. Cable service? Absolutely not.
The device is fantastic. Games, movies, shows, etc. There's a lot of utility in having a big, high-resolution screen as compared to a computer screen or, worse, a tiny phone screen. I love getting to relax on a couch and watch a favorite movie.
Cable and streaming are crap. Every year the prices go up, the content gets more fractured, the experience and service get worse, and it's just a bad time. I'm sick of promising new shows getting cancelled after 2 seasons. I'm sick of ENDLESS budget being spent on the most absurd CGI and effects instead of making something simpler and focused more on the story.
I have a TV because it's a nicer group experience than everyone viewing something via their personal device - whether that is cuddling up with a partner on the couch to watch a movie, or crowding around the TV with friends to play 8-way Super Smash Bros.
In case anyone accuses you of not comparing like to like, even a contemporary Bulova commercial is much more similar to the latter than the former:
https://youtu.be/trp7p634qAU?si=fGvyxHp_cayuw5xa
I'm not sure it is valid to use the first ad ever as a basis for comparison. At this time it was a novelty to even have a television – of course an incredibly basic ad would work. And how much do you think they had to pay for an ad on a very new technology? I doubt much.
I don't care to start a debate about who first invented television when, but I remember hearing (conformed by wikipedia [1]) that Leon Theremin, inventor of the musical instrument named after him, demonstrated mechanical television at roughly the same time.
I still only have CRT, No matter how much i browse shopping sites or visit showrooms, i cannot make up my mind buying newer tv, lcd, led, plasma, oled etc, so much new technologies have arrived but i have'nt tried them for TV Yet as of today
My tv's have gone through real stress test in real life unlike factories
During childhood, we had our tv Switched on in morning 4:00 till 22:00 at night, constantly being watched 16-18 hrs a day during weekends and vacations (45 days), while least 10hrs a day during weekdays , for last 22 years
I only had 2 crt in my 30yrs of lifetime, Sansui and Samsung,
channel broadcasters being changed from Tetrestrial Channels --> FTA Antenna --> Cable Tv --> Satellite Dish from time to time
Newer tv cannot cope up with such lenghty watchtimes,
Still RCA Only, no HDMI, Tv still have its Radio Antenna port on top
I think it was because old TVs already had wide gamut, so sRGB meant a significant reduction. It never was "contrast" as such. Anything made today is vastly better than any CRT.
CRTs are a very interesting display technology with their refresh rate and clarity. I'd like to see an "HD" CRT someday, and however many tons it would weigh!
Until very recently I had a Bang and Olufsen CRT, and it was by far the best picture I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately “small” (32”) yet simultaneously weighed a ton.
Only 100 years old.
Wow. I mean you know the world has changed rapidly but it's hard to get perspective enough to really feel that change. Something about it only having been 100 years since televsion really does that for me.
Television, arguably, can be blamed for the near-total degradation of civic life and, subsequently, human liberty. By substituting the unilateral flow of images for the dialogue of the community, television enforces a banking concept of reality where we are reduced to passive receptacles, stripping us of the bridging social capital necessary to resist domination.
This privatization of leisure generates a vicious circle of isolation, transforming the active citizen into a member of a lonely crowd. In this atomized state, we lose our mētis—the practical, situated knowledge essential for self-governance—and become vulnerable to the high-modernist state's imposition of simplified, legible grids upon our lives. Furthermore, the media inundates us with the myths, preventing us from naming the world for ourselves. To break this cycle, we must move from submissiveness to a liberating praxis that reclaims our time to build alternative social institutions and counterhegemony through direct, face-to-face cooperation.
Why, even here on Hacker News we've corroborated my position regarding the necessity of breaking the "spectacle" through direct, generative action. On a recent thread about the "loneliness epidemic," HN folks argued that the epidemic is not merely an individual failing but a structural byproduct of a "death spiral" where digital convenience and "behavior modification schemes" have cannibalized the "real world". The community identifies that the privatization of leisure—manifested in car-centric suburban sprawl and the erasure of "third places"—has stripped us of the capacity for spontaneous encounter, leaving us waiting for "nicely packaged solutions" rather than facing the "great unknown" of human connection. Consequently, the proposed remedy aligns precisely: individuals must transition from passive consumers to active "Hosts", building "alternative social institutions" like non-profit event platforms that reject "dark patterns", organizing "physical social networks" on street corners, or reclaiming public spaces through guerilla cleanup efforts, effectively proving that we must "stop waiting for someone else" to reconstruct the civic dialogue.
Having just finished my software-defined analog video decoder[0], I've gotta say, my mind is thoroughly blown by just how much of an engineering achievement television must've been at the time when it was invented. It must have also been the first ever communication system to have backwards compatibility.
Cool project. Anything in particular that you use it for? There are some great films or TV series that were never released in digital form and some more where the digital releases were butchered in some way (e.g. cropped) compared to the original analog broadcast / VHS / Laserdisc releases.
I made this to teach myself about digital signal processing and scratch an itch I had for a long time, starting back when these technologies were still current.
> Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects.
This idea is why I always take media with a grain of salt. The decontexualization makes it easy for people to be reactive towards something, that isn’t logical
Eg “now this is why <insert person or group> is good/evil”
People call me the devils advocate when I point out these nuances but I just think we need to be much more critical when forming and holding opinions.
Isn't "now this" just a synonym for "moving on" or "next order of business" or "apropos of nothing"? I don't think the concept of jumping to a completely new topic is something TV introduced.
It’s been a bit since I’ve read Amusing Ourselves to Death but I believe in the book the phrase ”Now this” is used disparagingly to refer to the fact that with tv you can go from a horrific news story like a local family being murdered to a completely unrelated story, both in content and emotion in the span of seconds. This doesn’t allow ample time for the viewer to process the former and essentially forces them to turn their brain off as the cognitive dissonance of holding both stories (and more) simultaneously would be impossible.
That's fair. It does seem pretty similar to just reading a newspaper and moving your eyes to the next story, but I get that TV is a lot more stimulating and you can't go at your own pace like you can with the paper.
I owned a TV for aproximatly 30 seconds, when an obnoxtious roomy sold me theres for $20, thinking they could still watch there horrid shit, but I promptly threw it off the balcony.
Obviously doing this with a screen, but I have zero "accounts" for social media that are not text based, and block everything by default.
My basic practice is to resist and avoid asymetric situations that are not defined by a negotiated contract or agreament, up or down.
funny story - I had a job recently that installed DirecTV setups for mostly retirement communities. On almost every service call, I'd show up and 95% of the time, without fail, they'd either be watching Fox News, CNN, or CNBC. It was quite depressing to see 24/7 news stations had completely consumed their lives and became the majority of topics of conversation while I was there.
I eventually quit the job. I decided I didn't want to be a part of making our society worse by installing these devices that were causing manufactured outrage, hate, and selective truth telling.
Soon after I left, I found a book while thrifting that came out in 1978 called "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" by Jerry Mander. I laughed at the title and couldn't believe someone was already arguing for the detriments of TV before I was born. It's very well written and the points he makes are still relevant today.
Mander believes that "television and democratic society are incompatible" due to television removing all of society's senses except for seeing and hearing. The author states that television makes it so that people have no common sense which leads to...being "powerless to reject the camera's line of sight, reset the stage, or call on our own sensory apparatus to correct the doctored sights and sounds the machine delivers".
Mander's four arguments in the book to eliminate television are:
1. that telecommunication removes the sense of reality from people,
2. television promotes capitalism,
3. television can be used as a scapegoat, and
4. that all three of these issues negatively work together.
Reminds me of Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985), in which he argues that TV as a medium is fundamentally incapable of producing anything other than entertainment. So things like news, political discussion, or any other type of educational programming can only exist on TV as a nutrition-less pantomime of the real thing.
Education, real education, can be made entertaining. Mythbusters and Connections (I believe it was called) both qualify. As do some historic documentaries.
It’s been a bit since I’ve read Amusing Ourselves to Death but I believe in the book the phrase ”Now this” is used disparagingly to refer to the fact that with tv you can go from a horrific news story like a local family being murdered to a completely unrelated story, both in content and emotion in the span of seconds. This doesn’t allow ample time for the viewer to process the former and essentially forces them to turn their brain off as the cognitive dissonance of holding both stories (and more) simultaneously would be impossible.
My late father told me the first time he saw a TV. He was in Ann Arbor, Michigan making a sales call in 1947. When he drove in he noticed there was a huge crowd around a store window but couldn't see what was going on.
After making the call he noticed the crowd was still there so he parked his car and decided to investigate. There was a black and white TV broadcasting a Detroit Tigers game in the window of a radio repair shop. He told me that he came away impressed.
I remember a similar story from my father, of people in the small town he was in crowding standing in the front yard of a neighbor, crowding around a picture window to look in at the first TV in town in the mid-1950's.
When I was born my parents bought a TV. Back then it was sold as a way of enhancing the education of children. I remember the early days of the web when the same case was made. Pretty sure you could have predicted it would descend to the lowest common denominator ;<).
The family stayed with black and white until the late seventies. I remember the entire family watching the first moon landing. For the longest time I didn't know whether NASA was recording in color or not ;<).
Thanks to TV you will no longer have to travel around the world to attend lectures. From the comfort of your home you can watch professors talk about cutting edge developments. It will be a revolution in education. Everyone will embrace the sciences! We will progress into the information age!
It's not their exact words and I also forgot who said it. It's probably better for them we don't remember.
Watching Dallas on a Tuesday evening with the entire family gathered in our parents' bedroom with me and brother and sister at the end of the bed on the floor watching the latest schemes of JR Ewing and poor hapless brother Bobby.
We never had the TV set in the lounge - it was meant for special occasions like tea and cake for family gatherings.
We still have a TV but it hardly used - everybody has iPads in the house.
On the one hand I look at some tech lifecycles and feel everything moves so slow (cars, energy and train infrastructure etc..). And then I look at other stuff and I cannot phantom that someone who was born 100 years ago saw a TV (or media electronic screen) from conception to modern miracle. As someone in his 20s I can't imagine what I'll see in the next 80 years!
Unfortunately technological progress is not always exponential. An human landed on the moon 56 years ago and people back then thought space travel would be a routine thing today so it'll be interesting to see how things go
It's certainly not routine, but I'd say the privatization of the space industry that's unfolded over the last few decades is significant progress.
When I get depressed and look out at the world, I'm actually amazed at what I'm living through—the internet, space travel, electric and autonomous cars, smartphones. It's really amazing.
SpaceEx has made a ton of progress in space travel, granted it's not an ideal situation with it being a mega corp, but it moved a hell of a lot faster than NASA could have.
Perhaps someday we'll have individualized space flight like we have ownership over our cars and private planes.
Don't know what you're getting at by saying the galaxy will be ruled by mega-corps. Seems pretty democratic so far, and most of the things achieved couldn't have been without organization.
> As someone in his 20s I can't imagine what I'll see in the next 80 years!
All of these rapid technological advancements are a function of tremendous increases in energy available .
We passed peak conventional oil years ago and only see proven reserves increase because we redefined 'shale oil' as included under proven reserves. But shale oil has much lower EROEI than traditional oil. We can already see geopolitics heating up before our eyes to capture and control what remains, but to continue to advance society we need more energy.
On top of this we are just now starting to feel the impacts of the effects of the byproducts of this energy usage: climate change. What we are experiencing now is only a slight hint of what is to come in recent years.
In the next 80 years we'll very likely see an incredible decline in technology as certain complex systems no longer have adequate energy to maintain. The climate will continue to worsen and in more extreme ways, while geopolitics melts down in a struggle for the last bits of oil and fossil fuels (interestingly these combine in the fight for Greenland because a soon-to-be ice free arctic holds lots of oil, not enough to advance civilization the way it has been going, but enough to keep yours running if you can keep everyone else away).
I sincerely suspect within the next 80 years we will see the full collapse of industrial civilization and very possibly the near or complete extinction of the human race. You can see the early stages of this beginning to unfold right now.
I don't think we'll see a decline in technology globally but there will definitely be some regressions in countries that put feel good politics over the energy needs of their citizens.
Analogue interlaced-scan TV systems like PAL and SECAM were actually ''higher'' definition in relation to NTSC by visual line count, although the former's 25Hz refresh rate was noticeable for flickering compared to NTSC's ~30Hz, which was much closer to the human eye's comfort level.
There was a prototype 819-line analogue ''high definition'' system used to record The T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, with excellent results, but the recordings were committed to film for distribution since there was no apparatus for broadcasting it:
There were also experiments by NHK of Japan with analogue HD broadcasting, but digital TV was so close on the horizon that it was mooted.
''High definition'' has been a relative term in the professional TV world all along, but became consumer buzzwords with the advent of digital TV in the early 2000's. Nowadays we know it to mean 720, 1080, or higher lines, usually in progressive scan.
> Analogue interlaced-scan TV systems like PAL and SECAM were actually ''higher'' definition in relation to NTSC by visual line count, although the former's 25Hz refresh rate was noticeable for flickering compared to NTSC's ~30Hz, which was much closer to the human eye's comfort level.
Yet motion pictures are still stuck at 24 FPS to this day and there are even people who have strong opinions about this being a good thing.
Also just because NTSC was 29.97 Hz doesn't mean that the video content actually was - almost everything shot on film was actually effectively 23.97 Hz - telecined to 59.94 fields per second but that doesn't actually change the number of unique full frames.
The interesting question (to me) is how directly a line can be drawn from the original invention to what we in modern times think of as “the thing”?
As an example, the Wright brothers built a biplane that had wing warping instead of ailerons and a canard design. That bears little resemblance to most modern airplanes, but people have little trouble crediting it as “the invention of the airplane” —- questions of whether the Wrights were first or not notwithstanding.
Can ”TV” be thus simplified so that an electromechanical device with spinning discs qualifies?
> The invention of the "airplane" is just a simplified term for "controlled and sustained powered flight"
Maybe? But most people think of it as "invented the airplane," and the two terms have different connotations in common use. Likewise, the title here says "television," not "real-time capture, transmission, and display of moving images" -- and similarly, I think the terms have different connotations.
People who do not have a technical education tend to have a less precise definition of things. There's not a great deal of point to arguing semantics.
There were precursors to Edison's light bulb, and people use that to denigrate Edison's achievement. But the technical reality of the Edison bulb is his bulb was practical, and the precursors were just curiosities.
Sure, and (as far as I know) Edison's basic pattern at discovery was much the same as what we use today (less so these days obviously):
1. Fill a sealed container with non-reactive gas or vacuum
2. String something conductive and heat-tolerant through it
3. Run enough current through it to make the thing glow
I think the same can be said for the Wright brothers -- perhaps less so for the reasons I gave previously.
I think a system that involves mechanical elements is farther from what most people think of when they think "TV"
I think this is likely to be true for every artistic creation that requires lots of capital and widespread human coordination. Ultimately for a TV show to be great many, many things have to go right, and much of what could go wrong happens after the money is spent and the air date is already assured. I'm grateful we've had so many great things, certainly far more than I'll have time to watch in my life. But I'm not a heavy TV viewer.
TV has a fairly bad record of keeping shows that are already shown to be good alive though because good does not equate profitable for the network or individual decision makers (which are again no the same thing).
That's just one of the things that has to go right: marketing, finding the audience, being in the right places and place in time for your target viewers, etc.
I think the problem nowadays is that there are so many channels and so much space to fill. TV runs 24/7 now on hundreds of channels. In many cases, it isn't worth the while of a small channel to make an expensive programme as they would lose money.
Sometimes, the "wrong" programme is the hit. I know the History Channel started off with serious documentaries (some of them excellent quality) which not enough people watched. They then tried Nazis and Ancient Egypt, but it seems to be "Ancient Aliens" which is their biggest hit. Its version of history is questionable, to say the least.
How many people even watch TV "channels" these days? Seems most people have moved to a la carte streaming services. I don't really like either myself and prefer local copies of films but seem to be in a very small minority there.
I've been having a lot of trouble with Amazon Prime. I specifically have it so that I can download films and watch them offline when I don't have internet, and yet the player keeps glitching. I do prefer physical media because at least I'm owning it instead of just hiring it.
Yeah, I don't really consider it a local copy when I can't play it in a player of my choice on any device I want. I'd be fine with digital files (although having a movie shelf is nice) but that isn't really an option so physical media (ripped to a hard disk for convenience) it is.
Well, A-Team was objectively terrible but I have a nostalgic connection to kids shows like that, Knight Rider etc. In retrospect Bay Watch was an effective CPR training tool at unprecedented scale.
It did always strike me as funny that Cronenberg had a movie about "what if TV was evil and made people murderous and the studio execs had to pay", and a movie about "what if video games were evil and made people murderous and their creators had to pay", but never a movie about "what if movies were evil and made people murderous and film directors had to pay". Obvious bias aside I wonder if it would work as a story - movies don't seem as hypnotic in the public consciousness, I believe.
In interesting plot point in the novel/movie Contact (early, so not much of a spoiler):
> […] This puts her at odds with much of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who pushes to defund SETI. Eventually, the project detects a signal from Vega, 26 light-years away, transmitting prime numbers.[a][b] Further analysis reveals a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's 1936 Olympic speech, the first TV signal to escape Earth's ionosphere.[1]
Another important person in creation of the TV technology was Vladimir Zworykin [0]. He developed cathode-ray tube based TV transmission devices that he patented in 1923 and 1925.
> It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.
- David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction
Philo Farnsworth did make considerable contribution to television with his image dissector, but he didn't make the first TV. He was the first TV patent holder in the US though.
CRTs are peak steam punk technology. Analog, electric, kinda dangerous. Just totally mindblowing that we had these things in our living rooms shooting electric beams everywhere. I doubt it's environmentally friendly at all, but I'd love to see some new CRTs being made.
There's a synchronous and instantaneous nature you don't find in modern designs.
The image is not stored at any point. The receiver and the transmitter are part of the same electric circuit in a certain sense. It's a virtual circuit but the entire thing - transmitter and receiving unit alike - are oscillating in unison driven by a single clock.
The image is never entirely realized as a complete thing, either. While slow phosphor tubes do display a static image, most CRT systems used extremely fast phosphors; they release the majority of the light within a millisecond of the beam hitting them. If you take a really fast exposure of a CRT display (say 1/100,000th of a second) you don't see the whole image on the photograph - only the most recently few drawn lines glow. The image as a whole never exists at the same time. It exists only in the persistence of vision.
> The image is not stored at any point.
Just wanted to add one thing, not as a correction but just because I learned it recently and find it fascinating. PAL televisions (the color TV standard in Europe) actually do store one full horizontal scanline at a time, before any of it is drawn on the screen. This is due to a clever encoding used in this format where the TV actually needs to average two successive scan lines (phase-shifted compared to each other) to draw them. Supposedly this cancels out some forms of distortion. It is quite fascinating this was even possible with analogue technology. The line is stored in a delay line for 64 microseconds. See e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsk4WWtRx6M
At some point, most NTSC TVs had delay lines, too. A comb filter was commonly used for separating the chroma from the luma, taking advantage of the chroma phase being flipped each line. Sophisticated comb filters would have multiple delay lines and logic to adaptively decide which to use. Some even delayed a whole field or frame, so you could say that in this case one or more frames were stored in the TV.
https://www.extron.com/article/ntscdb3
If a motion adaptive 3d comb filter (which requires comparing successive frames) was present on a TV, you can bet that it would be plastered all over the marketing material for the TV.
I only knew about SECAM, where it’s even part of the name (Système Électronique Couleur Avec Mémoire)
You can decode a PAL signal without any memory, the memory is only needed to correct for phase errors. In SECAM though, it's a hard requirement because the two color components, Db and Dr, are transmitted on alternating lines, and you need both on each line.
Yes that is called "PAL-S". But the system was designed to use the delay-line method and it was employed since the inception (first broadcast 1967).
The physical components of those delay lines were massive crystals with silver electrodes grafted on to them. Very interesting component.
All PAL TVs had a delay line in them? Crazy.
It doesn’t begin at the transmitter either, in the earliest days even the camera was essentially part of the same circuit. Yes, the concept of filming a show and showing the film over the air existed eventually, but before that (and even after that, for live programming) the camera would scan the subject image (actors, etc) line-by-line and down a wire to the transmitter which would send it straight to your TV and into the electron beam.
In fact in order to show a feed of only text/logos/etc in the earlier days, they would literally just point the camera at a physical object (like letters on a paper, etc) and broadcast from the camera directly. There wasn’t really any other way to do it.
Our station had an art department that used a hot press to create text boards that were set on an easel that had a camera pointed at it. By using a black background with white text you could merge the text camera with a camera in the studio and "super-imposed the text into the video feed.
"And if you tell the kids that today, they won't believe it!"
It's kind of amazing the sort of hoops people needed to jump through to make e.g. the BBC-1 ident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfpEZDeVo00
It seems like imagination was more common in those days. There was no "digital" anything to lean on.
The live-action PBS idents from the early 90's were some of the best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ap_JRofNMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJpiIyBkUZ4
This mini doc shows the process:
https://youtu.be/Q7iNg1dRqQI?t=167
>>> The image is not stored at any point.
The very first computers (Manchester baby) used CRTs as memory - the ones and zeros were bright spots on a “mesh” and the electric charge on the mesh was read and resent back to the crt to keep the ram fresh (a sorta self refreshing ram)
Yes, but those were not the standard kind of CRTs that are used in TV sets and monitors.
The CRTs with memory for early computers were actually derived from the special CRTs used in video cameras. There the image formed by the projected light was converted in a distribution of charge stored on an electrode, which was then sensed by scanning with an electron beam.
Using CRTs as memory has been proposed by von Neumann and in his proposal he used the appropriate name for that kind of CRT: "iconoscope".
Why didn't that catch on pre-transistor? Feels like you'd get higher density than valves and relays.
DRAM memories made with special CRTs with memory have been used for a few years, until 1954. For instance the first generation of commercial electronic computers made by IBM (scientific IBM 701 and business-oriented IBM 702) have used such CRTs.
Then the CRT memories have become obsolete almost instantaneously, due to the development of magnetic core memories, which did not require periodic refreshing and which were significantly faster. The fact that they were also non-volatile was convenient at that early time, though not essential.
Today, due to security concerns, you would actually not want for your main memory to be non-volatile, unless you also always encrypt it completely, which creates problems of secret key management.
So CRT memories have become obsolete several years before the replacement of vacuum tubes in computers with transistors, which happened around 1959/1960.
Besides CRT memories and delay line memories, another kind of early computer memory that has quickly become obsolete was the memory with magnetic drums.
In the cheapest early computers (like IBM 650), the main memory was not a RAM (i.e. neither a CRT nor with magnetic cores), but a magnetic drum memory (i.e. with sequential periodic access to data).
Yeah it super weird that while we struggle with latency in the digital world, storing anything for any amount of time is an almost impossible challenge in the analog world.
You should check out:
- Core memory - Drum memory - Bubble memory - Mercury delay line memory - Magnetic type memory :P
And probably many more. Remember that computers don't even need to be digital!
> computers don't even need to be digital!
or electric.
This stores a whole scanline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsk4WWtRx6M. This or something similar was in almost any decent color TV except for the oldest.
It's worth deep diving into how analog composite broadcast television works, because you quickly realize just how insanely ambitious it was for 1930s engineers to have not only conceived, but perfected and shipped at consumer scale using only 1930s technologies.
Being old enough to have learned video engineering at the end of the analog days, it's kind of fun helping young engineers today wrap their brains around completely alien concepts, like "the image is never pixels" then "it's never digital" and "never quantized." Those who've been raised in a digital world learn to understand things from a fundamentally digital frame of reference. Even analog signals are often reasoned about as if their quantized form was their "true nature".
Interestingly, I suspect the converse would be equally true trying to explain digital television to a 1930s video engineer. They'd probably struggle similarly, always mentally remapping digital images to their "true" analog nature. The fundamental nature of their world was analog. Nothing was quantized. Even the idea "quanta" might be at the root of physics was newfangled, suspect and, even if true, of no practical use in engineering systems.
Yes agreed! And while it is not quantized as such there is an element of semi-digital protocol to it. The concept of "scanline" is quantized and there's "protocols" for indicating when a line ends, and a picture ends etc. that the receiver/send needs to agree on... and "colorbursts packets" for line, delay lines and all kinds of clever technique etc. so it is extremely complicated. Many things were necessary to overcome distortion and also to ensure backwards compatibility - first, how do you fit in the color so a monochrome TV can still show it? Later, how do you make it 16:9 and it can still show on a 4:3 TV (which it could!).
> And while it is not quantized as such there is an element of semi-digital protocol to it.
Yes, before posting I did debate that exact point in my head, with scanlines as the clearest example :-). However, I decided the point is still directionally valid because ultimately most timing-centric analog signal encoding has some aspect of being quantized, if only to thresholds. Technically it would be more correct to narrow my statement about "never quantized" to the analog waveform driving the electron gun as it sweeps horizontally across a line. It always amazes digital-centric engineers weaned on pixels when they realize the timing of the electron gun sweep in every viewer's analog TV was literally created by the crystal driving the sweep of the 'master' camera in the TV studio (and would drift in phase with that crystal as it warmed up!). It's the inevitable consequence of there being no practical way to store or buffer such a high frequency signal for re-timing. Every component in the chain from the cameras to switchers to transmitters to TVs had to lock to the master clock. Live TV in those days was truly "live" to within 63.5 microseconds of photons hitting vacuum tubes in the camera (plus the time time it took for the electrons to move from here to there). Today, "live" HDTV signals are so digitally buffered, re-timed and re-encoded at every step on their way to us, we're lucky if they're within 20 seconds of photons striking imagers.
My larger point though was that in the 1930s even that strict signal timing had to be encoded and decoded purely with discrete analog components. I have a 1950s Predicta television and looking at the components on the boards one can't help wondering "how the hell did they come up with this crazy scheme." Driving home just how bonkers the whole idea of analog composite television was for the time.
> first, how do you fit in the color so a monochrome TV can still show it?
To clarify for anyone who may not know, analog television was created in the 1930s as a black-and-white composite standard defined by the EIA in the RS-170 specification, then in 1953 color was added by a very clever hack which kept all broadcasts backward compatible with existing B&W TVs (defined in the RS-170A specification). Politicians mandated this because they feared nerfing all the B&W TVs owned by voters. But that hack came with some significant technical compromises which complicated and degraded color analog video for over 50 years.
Yes knew what you meant, and fully agree. It is fascinating TV is even possible just out of all these rather simple and bulky analog components. Even the first color TV's were with vacuum tubes and no transitors.
As I recall there's all kinds of hacks in the design to keep them cheap. For instance, letting the fly-back transformer for producing the high voltages needed operate at the same frequency as the horizontal scan rate (~15 kHz) so that mechanism essentially serves double duty. The same was even seen in microcomputers where the same crystal needed for TV was also used for the microprocessor - meaning that e.g. a "European" Commodore 64 with PAL was actually a few percent slower than an American C64 with NTSC. And other crazy things like that.
> "European" Commodore 64 with PAL was actually a few percent slower than an American C64 with NTSC. And other crazy things like that.
Indeed! Even in the Playstation 2 era, many games still ran at different speeds in Europe than the U.S. and Japan. There were so many legacy artifacts which haunted computers, games, DVDs and more for decades after analog broadcast was supplanted by digital. And it all arose from the fact the installed base and supporting broadcast infrastructure of analog television was simply too massive to replace. In a way it was one of the biggest accrued "technical debts" ever!
The only regrettable thing is during the long, painful transition from analog to digital, a generation of engineers got the idea that the original analog TV standard was somehow bad - which, IMHO, is really unfair. The reality is the original RS-170 standard was a brilliant solution which perfectly fulfilled, and even exceeded, all its intended use cases for decades. The problems only arose when that solution was kept alive far beyond its intended lifetime and then hacked to support new use cases like color encoding while maintaining backward compatibility.
Analog television was created solely for natural images captured on vacuum tube cameras. Even the concept of synthetic imagery like character generator text and computer graphic charts was still decades in the future. Then people who weren't yet born when TV was created, began to shove poorly converted, hard-edged, low-res, digital imagery into a standard created to gracefully degrade smooth analog waveforms and it indeed sucked. I learned to program on an 8-bit computer with 4K of RAM connected to a Sears television through an RF modulator. Even 32 columns of 256x192 text was a blurry mess with color fringes! On many early 8-bit computers, some colors would invert randomly based on which clock phase the computer started on! Red would be blue and vice versa so we'd have to repeatedly hit reset until the colors looked correct. But none of that craziness was the fault of the original television engineers, we were abusing what they created in ways they couldn't have imagined.
It's interesting how early digital video systems were influenced by the analog aspects. DVDs were very much still defined by NTSC/PAL even though the data is fully digital.
Indeed and even today's HDTV specification has elements based on echoes reverberating all the way from decisions made in the 1930s when specifying B&W TV.
The composite and component sampling rates (14.32 MHz and 13.5 MHz) are both based on being 4x a specific existing color carrier sampling rate from analog television. And those two frequencies directly dictated all the odd-seeming horizontal pixel resolutions we find in pre-HD digital video (352, 704, 360, 720 and 768) and even the original PC display resolutions (CGA, VGA, XGA, etc).
For example, the 720 horizontal pixels of DVD and digital satellite broadcasts was tied to the digital component video standard sampling the active picture area of an analog video scanline at 13.5 Mhz to capture the 1440 clock transitions in that waveform. Similarly, 768 (another common horizontal resolution in pre-HD video) is tied to the composite video standard sampling at 14.32 MHz to capture 1536 clock transitions. The history of how these standards were derived is fascinating (https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_304-rec601_wood.pdf)
VGA's horizontal resolution of 640 is simply from adjusting analog video's rectangular aspect ratio to be square (720 * 0.909 = 640). It's kind of fascinating all these modern digital resolutions can be traced back to decisions made in the 1930s based on which affordable analog components were available, which competing commercial interests prevailed (RCA vs Philco) and the political sensitivities present at the time.
I was on a course at Sony in San Mateo in the 1980s and they had a 36" prototype television in the corner. We all asked for it to be turned on. We were told by the instructor that he was not allowed to turn it on because the 40,000V anode voltage generated too many X-rays at the front of the picture tube.
:-))))
And perhaps peak atompunk too when used as RAM. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube
Damn, what I wouldn't give to be able to look at my computer and see the bits bobbing in its onboard ram
Like the MegaProcessor? [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNa9bQRPMB8
Yes but for my 9950x, lol
One summer odd-job included an afternoon of throwing a few dozen CRTs off a 3rd floor balcony into a rolloff dumpster. I'da done it for free.
People pay for that these days in smash rooms.
Rock and roll!
What do you mean "had"? I just turned mine off a minute ago. I am yet to make the transition to flat screen TVs but in the mean time, at least no-one's tracking my consumer habits.
Not through your TV, but they see you driving to the last Blockbuster tho
I wish.
Extra dangerous aspect: On really early CRTs they hadn't quite nailed the glass thicknesses. One failure mode was that the neck that held the electron gun would fail. This would propell the gun through the front of the screen, possibly toward the viewer.
I don't know, "Killed by electron gun breakdown" sounds like a rad way to go. You can replace "electron gun" with "particle accelerator" if you want.
Likewise, a dropped CRT tube was a constant terror for TV manufacturing and repair folks, as it likely would implode and send zillions of razor-sharp fragments airborne.
My high school science teacher used to share anecdotes from his days in electrical repair.
He said his coworkers would sometimes toss a television capacitor at each other as a prank.
Those capacitors retained enough charge to give the person unlucky enough to catch one a considerable jolt.
Touching one of those caps was a hell of an experience. It was similar in many ways to a squirrel tap with a wrench in the auto shop (for those who didn't do auto shop, a squirrel tap with a wrench is when somebody flicks your nut sack from behind with a wrench. Properly executed it would leave you doubled over out of breath).
lol I did this with my mates. Get one of those 1 kV ceramics, give it some charge and bob's your uncle, you have one angry capacitor.
This can be deadly :/ just wow
Many fun things can be.
I remember smashing a broken monitor as a kid for fun, hearing about the implosion stuff, and sadly found the back of the glass was stuck to some kind of plastic film that didnt allow the pieces to fly about :(
I can't still get over how we used to put them straight in our faces, yet I never knew of someone having an accidental face reshaping ever.
That doesn't match my experience of deliberately dropping an old CRT monitor off the roof. Implosions are unfortunately not as exciting as explosions.
Some recent HN comments about CRT implosions people have experienced.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355765
"I still have a piece of glass in back of the palm of my right hand. Threw a rock at an old CRT and it exploded, after a couple of hours I noticed a little blood coming out of that part of hand. Many, many years later was doing xray for a broken finger and doctor asked what is that object doing there? I shrugged, doc said, well it looks like it's doing just fine, so might as well stay there. How lucky I am to have both eyes."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354919
"2. Throwing a big big stone to an abandoned next to the trashcan CRT TV while I had it placed normally because it didn’t break when I threw it facing up and the next thing I remember after opening my eyes which I closed from the bang was my friends who were further down the road looking at me as it I were a ghost since big big chunks for the CRT glass flew just right next to me.
CRTs were dangerous in many aspects!"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46356432
"I'll never forget the feeling of the whoosh when I was working as a furniture mover in the early 2000s and felt the implosion when a cardboard box collapsed and dumped a large CRT TV face-down on the driveway, blowing our hair back. When the boss asked what happened to the TV, I said it fell, and our lead man (who had set it on the box) later thanked me for putting it so diplomatically."
The ''tube'' was indeed extrememly fragile and thus extremely dangerous. I'm talking about only the unguarded ''tube'' itself. Repair and manufacturer technicians had to deal with that on a regular basis. Later, consumer protection laws and other standards came into effect that made TV and monitor superstructures more capable of guarding such a dangerous internal component. Your experience was clearly with those much safer, later types.
While not entirely thematically unrelated, being electric puts it distinctly outside of steampunk and even dieselpunk. I don't think anyone would call The Matrix steampunk but CRTs are at the center of its aesthetic. Cassette Futurism is the correct term I believe though it also overlaps with some sub-genres of cyberpunk.
Yes - and x-rays too! Both from the main TV tube itself (though often shielded) but historically the main problem was actually the vacuum rectifiers used to generate the high voltages required. Those vacuum tubes essentially became x-ray bulbs and had to be shielded. This problem appeared as the first color TV's appeared in the late 60s. Color required higher voltages for the same brightness, due to the introduction of a mask that absorbed a lot of the energy. As a famous example, certain GE TV's would emit a strong beam of x-rays, but it was downwards so it would mostly expose someone beneath the TV. Reportedly a few models could emit 50,000 mR/hr at 9 inches distance https://www.nytimes.com/1967/07/22/archives/owners-of-9000-c... which is actually quite a lot (enough for radiation sickness after a few hours). All were recalled of course!
With CRTs, the environmental problem is the heavy metals: tons of lead in the glass screen, plus cadmium and whatnot. Supposedly there can be many pounds of lead in a large CRT.
The shadow mask system for colour CRTs was a huge improvement that thwarted worries about ''beams everywhere'':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mask
Actually, the voltages had to be raised due to the shadow mask, and this rise in voltage meant you were now in x-ray territory, which wasn't the case before. The infamous problems with TV's emitting x-rays and associate recalls were the early color TV's. And it wasn't so much from the tube, but from the shunt regulators etc. in the power supply that were themselves vacuum tubes. If you removed the protection cans around those you would be exposed to strong radiation. Most of that went away when the TV's were transistorized so the high-voltage circuits didn't involve vacuum tubes.
Most of those old TVs were not Faraday Caged either, nor were they grounded to earth, so all that radiation and energy was one hardware failure away from seriously unfunny events. Their chassis grounding always gave a tingle to the touch.
Try antialias with that bad boy
The 1940-1990 era of technology can't be beat. Add hard drives and tape to the mix. What happened to electromechanical design? I doubt it would be taught anymore. Everything is solid state
Solid state is the superior technology for almost everything. No moving parts means more reliable, quieter, and very likely more energy efficient since no mass has to move.
Do modern hdd's last as long as the old platter ones? For me, when the SSDs fail it's frustrating because I can't open it up and do anything about it--it's a complete loss. So I tend to have a low opinion of their reliability (same issue I have with old versus new electronic-everything cars). I don't know the actual lifetimes. Surely USB sticks are universally recognized as pretty crappy. I can leave those in the same location plugged in and they'll randomly die after a couple of years.
I feel like I'm the only person in the world who never had an issue with USB flash drives. Or HDDs for that matter. Or SSDs. I don't think I've ever had any storage die on me except optical disks.
Internet says both HDDs and SSDs have similar average lifespans, but with HDDs it's usually a mechanical failure so yes, you can often DIY it back to life if you have the right parts. With SSDs it's almost always the memory cells themselves wearing out. On the flip side, data recovery is usually much easier since SSD will usually keep working in read-only mode for a while, whereas a faulty HDD won't work at all.
I've had two SSDs "die" over the years, both of them went read-only, but I was able to recover all data. SSD failure modes are weird.
That and modern digital TV is just incredibly boring from the technical standpoint. Because everything is a computer these days, it's just some MPEG-2 video. The only thing impressive about it is that they managed to squeeze multiple channels worth of video streams into the bandwidth of one analog channel.
Also, I believe precursors to CRT existed in the 19th century. What was unique with television was the creation of a full CRT system that allowed moving picture consumption to be a mass phenomena.
We're getting awfully close to recreating CRT qualities with modern display panels. A curved 4:3 1000Hz OLED panel behind glass, and an integrated RetroTink 4K with G-Sync Pulsar support would do it. Then add in a simulated degauss effect and electrical whine and buzzing sounds for fun.
still can't play duck hunt on it though.
Yes you can, see https://neslcdmod.com/
It basically mods the rom to allow for a bit more latency when checking the hit targets
Why curved? We didn't like the CRT curvature back then and manufacturers struggled to make them as flat as possible, finally reaching "virtually flat" screens towards the end of the CRT era. I have one right here on my desk, a Sony Multiscan E200.
>1000 Hz
This sounds like a brute force solution over just having the display controller read the image as it is being sent and emulating the phosphors.
A 1000 Hz panel does not imply that the computer has to send 1000 frames per second.
Whoops, I misremembered. G-Sync Pulsar works with a 360Hz panel, claims perceived motion clarity comparable to 1000Hz+.
This is a cool little project you might be interested in - https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass
This thread makes me realise that the old Telequipment D61 Cathode Ray Oscilloscope I have is worth hanging on to. It's basically a CRT with signal conditioning on its inputs, including a "Z mod" input, making it easy to do cool stuff with it.
'Steampunk' means no electricity. You need to come up with another term. Analogpunk, maybe?
"Dieselpunk" is sometimes considered the next door neighbor term for WW1 through early 1950's retrofuturism with electricity and radios/very early televisions.
Sometimes people use "Steampunk" for shorthand for both because there are some overlaps in either direction, especially if you are trying for "just" pre-WWI retrofuture. Though I think the above poster was maybe especially trying to highlight the sort of pre-WWI overlap with Steampunk with more electricity but not yet as many cars and "diesel".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieselpunk
I don't know. Steam and electricity seem more like a coincidence that they were developed at the same time, so worlds without one seem natural. Another possibility might be no semiconductors. No nuclear also feels plausible, but it's just not interesting. Anything else requires a massive stretch to explain why technology got stuck in such a state.
Perhaps, if you are worried about realism from the perspective of modern technology. But a lot of the concept of retrofuturism is considering the possible futures from the perspectives of the past. You don't necessarily need realism for why you would consider an exercise like that.
Steampunk is "rootable" in the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and others. We have scifi visions from Victorian and Edwardian lenses. It wasn't needed at the time to explain how you steam power a submarine or a rocket ship, it was just extrapolating "if this goes on" of quick advances in steam power and expecting them to eventually get there.
Similar with a lot of Diselpunk. The 1930s through the 1950s are often referred to as the Golden Age of scifi. There's so much science fiction written in the real world with a zeal for possible futures that never happened. We don't necessarily need a "massive stretch" to explain why technology took a different path or "got stuck" at a particular point. We've plenty of ideas of the exuberance of that era just in the books that they wrote and published themselves.
(Not that we are lacking in literary means to create excuses for the "realism" of retrofuture, either, when we care to. For one obvious instance, the Fallout franchise's nuclear warfare is central to its dieselpunk setting and an obvious reason for technology to get "stuck". For one less obvious reason, I like "For All Mankind" and its "Apollopunk" setting using the excuse of Russia beating the United States to first boots on the Moon and the butterfly impacts that could have had.)
I mean that steampunk looks plausible, because it indeed seems to be purely a historical coincidence that electricity was developed at the same time. They are unrelated, one doesn't follow from the other in any way, so there is no obvious need to have both.
You pretty much need to have both chemistry and electricity, or neither.
Even Jules Verne understood the impossibility (or at least absurd impracticality) of a steam powered submarine, and made Nautilus electric.
It's unclear if internal combustion engines would be developed without electricity, and to what degree they would become practical.
I'm not sure about semiconductors, but the discovery does seem fairly random, and it seems plausible that electronics could just go on with vacuum tubes.
It seems perfectly plausible that nuclear wasn't noticed or practically developed, but, as I said, it just isn't an interesting setting.
[dead]
I saw TV first time in 1957. Finland had no TV transmitters, so programs came from Soviet Estonia. I distinctly remember watching romantic Russian film with a catching tune. Perhaps named "Moscow Lights"?
How this is even possible that I remember all this, because I was 4 yrs old?
Gemini knows:
The Film: In the Days of the Spartakiad (1956/1957)
The song "Moscow Nights" was originally written for a documentary film called "In the Days of the Spartakiad" (V dni spartakiady), which chronicled a massive Soviet sports competition.
The Scene: In the film, there is a romantic, quiet scene where athletes are resting in the countryside near Moscow at night.
The Music: The song was sung by Vladimir Troshin. It was intended to be background music, but it was so hauntingly melodic that it became an overnight sensation across the USSR and its neighbors.
The Finnish Connection: In 1957, the song became a massive hit in Finland and Estonia. Since you were watching Estonian TV, you likely saw a version where the dialogue or narration was dubbed into Finnish—a common practice for broadcasts intended for Finnish-speaking audiences across the Gulf of Finland.
Isn't it wild that you are asking 5th (or so) technological miracle that happened in your life time about the first one you remember?
I actually thought that the "Computer" was some kind of abstract construct in 1971. And "programs" were just a method of expressing algorithms in textual manner. Only when we were allowed to have brief interactions with Teletype, did I believe there was actual machine that understands and executes these complex commands. Mind Blown.
I was busy being born that year :)
I easily have many memories from age 4. I think I even remember the first time that I started forming memories. It was a few years before that, I had come out of my room and saw some toys I was playing with the night before. I realized they were at the same spot I left them, which made me realize the world had permanence and my awareness had continuity. I could leave things at a certain spot and they would be there the next day, that I could build things and they would stay that way. I realized I could remember things, in a way like "homo sapiens sapiens" being thinking about thinking, I realized I remember that I could remember.
This is a fascinating post but I don't believe it reflects (most) human memory development, which has a pronounced forgetting phase called 'childhood amnesia'. When your kid starts to talk, it's startling what a two-year-old can remember and can tell you about. And it's kinda heartbreaking when they're 4-5 and you realise that those early memories have faded.
Note that your memories might not be accurate, as your brain may have skightly altered them over the years, over and over. There is generally no way for yourself to know (except for some external proof).
This is not just the case for early childhood memories, but for anything - the more time passes, the less accurate. It's even possible to have completely "made-up" memories, perceived as 100% real, e.g. through suggestive questioning in therapy.
I can relate. I often feel like my earliest memories are now more like memories of memories, and I dimly recall that it wasn’t always like that.
Definitely have some memories from 3 years old - some people claim earlier and I wouldn't doubt that, although it's very rare for memories before 2 to be recalled episodically.
It's also hard to be sure if early memories are actually memories from the actual event or are memories your brain constructed from later hearing people describe the event.
There was one experiment where researchers got a man's family at a holiday gathering of the extended family to start talking about funny things that had happened to family members when they were children. In particular the man's parents and siblings told about a funny incident that happened to the man during his 3rd grade school play.
The man had earlier agreed to participate in some upcoming psychological research but did not yet know the details or been told when the research would start.
Later he was contacted and told the research would be starting soon, and asked to come in an answer some background questions. They asked about early non-academic school activities and he told them about his 3rd grade play and the funny incident that happened, including details that his family had not mentioned.
Unbeknownst to the man the research had actually started earlier and the man's family had agreed to help out. That story about the 3rd grade play that his family told was actually given to them by the researchers. None of his elementary school classes had put on any plays.
This sort of thing can be a real problem. People being questioned about crimes (as witnesses or suspects) can get false memories of the crime if the person questioning them is not careful. Or worse, a questioner could intentionally get them to form false memories that they will later recall on the witness stand.
The memories are probably nothing like how they were at the time, but I vividly remember running away from my parents with my elder sister, getting bullied by an extremely blond girl at day care, and falling and literally eating dirt including that it was salty around 2-3.
But at some point don't you lose the direct memory, and only retain remembering it? Eg I don't know that I directly remember the fight I got in with the neighbor kid at age 4, but I can definitely remember thinking about it for a something we had to write in school around age 8. Or at least I could when I was in high school. That's when I thought about the time I had to write that essay when I was 8. At some point all I remember are the like the layers of subsequent thoughts about the original event, and I don't really access the original event any more, or it's just a stub.
At some point, most memories are like that, to be honest – not just early childhood ones. You could say I consider these are "vivid" because I can recall more details of them than of the average memory.
I have one memory that I can place between late 2 and early 3: my mum telling me I was going to have a brother. When he was born, I was 3 years and 6 months old.
link to "Vladimir Trochin - Moscow nights (1956)" https://youtu.be/fRFScbISKDg?si=UsVHVnlnUnU2SP6v
My first memory of TV (but not my earliest memory by far) was, at age 4, seeing the first Space Shuttle launch. It was live on a little black-and-white set my parents had in their bedroom.
This is interesting. John Logie Baird did in fact demonstrate something that looked like TV, but the technology was a dead end.
Philo Farnsworth demonstrated a competing technology a few years later, but every TV today is based on his technology.
So, who actually invented Television?
For what it’s worth, Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird were friendly with each other. I was lucky to know Philo’s wife Pem very well in the last part of her life, and she spoke highly of Baird as a person.
David Sarnoff and RCA was an entirely different matter, of course…
The article has a photo of a plaque putting Baird's death in 1946, less than 40 years old.
What happened?
He was 57, born in 1888. Died of a stroke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Logie_Baird#Death
One of his electro-mechanical units was on display in Victoria, Australia. Most amazing assemblage, you can sort-of get the idea from things.
I read online that at his end, Baird was proposing a TV scan-rate we'd class as HD quality, which lost out to a 405 line standard (which proceeded 625/colour)
There is also a quality of persistence in his approach to things, he was the kind of inventor who doesn't stop inventing.
Whatever we all television now, television then was literally "vision at a distance", which Baird was the first to demonstrate (AFAIK).
The TV I have now in my living room is closer to a computer than a television from when I grew up (born 1975) anyway, so the word could mean all sorts of things. I mean, we still call our pocket computers "phones" even though they are mainly used for viewing cats at a distance.
You should read about the invention of color television. There were two competing methods, one of which depended on a spinning wheel with colored filters in it. If I remember correctly, you needed something like a 10-foot wheel to have a 27-inch TV.
Sure enough, this was the system selected as the winner by the U.S. standard-setting body at the time. Needless to say, it failed and was replaced by what we ended up with... which still sucked because of the horrible decision to go to a non-integer frame rate. Incredibly, we are for some reason still plagued by 29.97 FPS long after the analog system that required it was shut off.
Originally you had 30fps, it was the addition of colour with the NTSC system that dropped it to 30000/1001fps. That wasn't a decision taken lightly -- it was a consequence of retrofitting colour onto a black and white system while maintaining backward compatibility.
When the UK (and Europe) went colour it changed to a whole new system and didn't have to worry too much about backward compatibility. It had a higher bandwidth (8mhz - so 33% more than NTSC), and was broadcasting on new channels separate to the original 405 lines. It also had features like alternating the phase of every other line to reduce the "tint" or "never twice the same color" problem that NTSC had
America chose 30fps but then had to slow it by 1/1001ths to avoid interference.
Of course because by the 90s and the growth of digital, there was already far too much stuff expecting "29.97"hz so it remained, again for backward compatibility.
60 interlaced fields per second, not 30 frames per second. The two fields do not necessarily contribute to the same frame.
Which unfortunately also has continued to plague us much longer than we have used any display technology where that might have made any sense.
If you get those fields out of sync, you will have problems though, so it's okay to consider them in pairs per frame for sanity's sake.
In the UK the two earliest channels (BBC1 and ITV) continued to broadcast in the 405 line format (in addition to PAL) until 1985. Owners of ancient televisions had 20 years to upgrade. That doesn't seem unreasonable.
An engineer at RCA in New Jersey told me that at the first(early) NTSC color demo the interference was corrected by hand tweaking the color sub-carrier oscillator from which vertical and horizontal intervals were derived and the final result was what we got.
The interference was caused when the spectrum of the color sub-carrier over-lapped the spectrum of the horizontal interval in the broadcast signal. Tweaking the frequencies allowed the two spectra to interleave in the frequency domain.
understanding the affect of the 1.001 fix has given me tons of job security. That understanding came not from just book learning, but OJT from working in a film/video post house that had engineers, colorists, and editors that were all willing to entertain a young college kid's constant use of "why?". Then being present for the transition from editing film on flat beds to editing film transfers to video. Part of that came from having to transfer audio from tape reels to video by changing to the proper 59.94Hz or 60Hz crystal that was needed to control the player's speed. Also had a studio DAT deck that could slow down the 24fps audio record in the field to playback at 23.976.
Literally, to this day, am I dealing with all of these decisions made ~100 years ago. The 1.001 math is a bit younger when color was rolled out, but what's a little rounding between friends?
Why is an integer frame rate better?
For one thing, it’s much easier to measure spans of time when you have an integer frame rate. For example, 1 hour at 30fps is exactly 108,000 frames, but at 29.97 it’s only 107,892 frames. Since frame numbers must all have an integer time code, “drop-frame” time code is used, where each second has a variable number of frames so that by the end of each measured hour the total elapsed time syncs up with the time code, i.e. “01:00:00;00” falls after exactly one hour has passed. This is of course crucial when scheduling programs, advertisements, and so on. It’s a confusing mess and historically has caused all kinds of headaches for the TV industry over the years.
I had a communications theory class in college that addressed "vestigal sideband modulation," which I believe was implemented by Farnsworth. I think this is a critical aspect to the introduction of television technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation#Sup...
VSB came later. From https://www.tvtechnology.com/opinions/hdtv-from-1925-to-1994
In the United States in 1935, the Radio Corporation of America demonstrated a 343-line television system. In 1936, two committees of the Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), which is now known as the Consumer Electronics Association, proposed that U.S. television channels be standardized at a bandwidth of 6 MHz, and recommended a 441-line, interlaced, 30 frame-per-second television system. The RF modulation system proposed in this recommendation used double-sideband, amplitude-modulated transmission, limiting the video bandwidth it was capable of carrying to 2.5 MHz. In 1938, this RMA proposal was amended to employ vestigial-sideband (VSB) transmission instead of double sideband. In the vestigial-sideband approach, only the upper sidebands-those above the carrier frequency-plus a small segment or vestige of the lower sidebands, are transmitted. VSB raised the transmitted video bandwidth capability to 4.2 MHz. Subsequently, in 1941, the first National Television Systems Committee adopted the vestigial sideband system using a total line rate of 525 lines that is used in the United States today.
The thing is that "television" seemed like a thing but really it was a system that required a variety of connected, compatible parts, like the Internet.
Different pieces of what became TV existed in 1900, the challenge was putting them together. And that required a consensus among powerful players.
There were a great many small breakthroughs over time. Where you draw the line is up to you.
Wasn't all this early TV experimentation based on Nipkow disks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipkow_disk)?
I think it would be pretty uncontroversial from the technological point of view, but then, the first "real" TV broadcast would be the 1936 Olympic games...
"The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television" is a great book detailing the Farnsworth journey.
Farnsworth…
Wernstrom!
Baird did. Farnsworth invented the all-electric version (sans mechanical parts).
A kin to Ed Roberts, John Blakenbaker and Mark Dean invented the personal computer but Apple invented the PC as we know it.
You're skipping a few steps (like the Altair 8800) if you say that Apple invented the PC as we know it. Apple didn't even invent the GUI as we know it.
No, I mentioned Ed Roberts. Up until Apple, you had to solder your own or buy one that was put together for you.
> but every TV today is based on his technology.
Philo Farnsworth invented the cathode ray tube. unless you're writing this from the year 2009 or before, I'm going to have to push back on the idea that tv's TODAY are based on his technology. They most certainly are not.
1897 Ferdinand Braun invents the Cathode Ray Tube dubbed "Braunsche Röhre"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenjiro_Takayanagi
'Although he failed to gain much recognition in the West, he built the world's first all-electronic television receiver, and is referred to as "the father of Japanese television"'
He presented it in 1926 (Farnsworth in 1927)
However father of television was this dude:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_von_Ardenne
Better resolution, wireless transmission and Olympics 1936
He invented electronic rasterization, a form of which is still in use today.
No, Braun invented the cathode ray tube.
And 100 years ago my great-aunt and grandmother (both RIP) were little kids and my great-grandmother, born in the 19th century and which I knew very well for she lived until 99 years old, was filming them playing on the beach using a "Pathe Baby" hand camera.
I still have the reels, they look like this:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Films_Path%C3%A9-Bab...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9-Baby
And we converted some of these reels to digital files (well brothers and I asked a specialized company to "digitalize" them).
100 years ago people already had cars, tramways (as a kid my great-grandmother tried to look under the first tramway she saw to see "where the horses were hiding"), cameras to film movies, telephones, the telegraph existed, you could trade the stock market and, well, it's knew to me but TV was just invented too.
On the one hand, it's fascinating to know just how much of what shapes our lives was already there a hundred years ago in some form.
On the other hand, it's just as fascinating to realize that all that, and ~everything that shapes modern life, did not exist until ~200 years ago. Not just appliances, but medicines and medicine, plastics and greases and other products of petrochemical industry and everything built on top of it, paints and cleaners and materials and so on...
In a way television was kind of cool. I loved it as a child, give or take.
Nowadays ..... hmmm. I no longer own a TV since many years. Sadly youtube kind of replaced television. It is not the same, quality-wise I think youtube is actually worse than e. g. the 1980s era. But I also don't really want to go back to television, as it also had low quality - and it simply took longer, too. On youtube I was recently watching old "Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst", in german. The old videos are kind of cool and interesting from the 1980s. I watched the new ones - it no longer made ANY sense to watch it ... the quality is much worse, and it is also much more boring. It's strange.
I remember when we organized our lives around television. On Saturday mornings it would be cartoons (including the first full-CGI television shows, Reboot and Transformers: Beast Wars), Wednesday evenings would be Star Trek: TNG, Fridays would be the TGIF block of family shows (from early-to-mid-90s USA perspective here). It felt like everyone watched the same thing, everyone had something to talk about from last night's episode, and there was a common connection over what we watched as entertainment.
We saw a resurgence of this connection with big-budget serials like Game of Thrones, but now every streaming service has their own must-watch thing and it's basically as if everyone had their own personal broadcast station showing something different. I don't know if old-school television was healthy for society or not, but I do have a feeling of missing out on that shared connection lately.
> but I do have a feeling of missing out on that shared connection lately
Mass media isolates individuals who don't have access to it. I grew up without a TV, and when TV was all my neighbors could talk about, I was left out, and everyone knew it.
While other children were in front of the television gaining "shared experience", I built forts in the woods with my siblings, explored the creek in home made boats, learned to solder, read old books, wrote basic computer programs, launched model rockets, made up magic tricks. I had a great childhood, but I had a difficult time connecting with children whose only experiences were these shallow, shared experiences.
Now that media is no longer "shared", the fragmented content that people still consume has diminishing social value -- which in many cases was the only value it had. Which means there are fewer social consequences for people like me who choose not to partake.
Mass media even moreso isolates individuals who DO have access to it.
Their "shared experience" is, actually, a debilitating addiction to flat, untouchable, and anti-democratic spectacle.
The least hundred years have seen our society drained of social capital, inescapably enthralled by corporate mediators. Mass media encourages a shift from "doing" to "watching." As we consume hand-tailored entertainment in private, we retreat from the public square.
Heavy television consumption is associated with lethargy and passivity, reinforcing an intolerance for unstructured time. This creates a "pseudoworld" where viewers feel a false sense of companionship—a parasocial connection with television personalities—that creates a feeling of intimacy while requiring (and offering) no actual reciprocity or effort.
Television, the "800-pound gorilla of leisure time," has privatized our existence. This privatization of leisure acts as a lethal competitor for scarce time, stealing hours that were once devoted to social interaction—the picnics, club meetings, and informal visiting that constitute the mētis or practical social knowledge of community life.
it feels like you're advocating that "unless everybody can form a shared connection through common culture, nobody should for a shared connection through common culture".
It’s funny because when social media first came out, I also start to feel I had shared experiences and I wasn’t weird
This is something I've been lamenting for a long time. The lack of shared culture. Sometimes a mega-hit briefly coalesces us, but for the most part everyone has their own thing.
I miss the days when everyone had seen the same thing I had.
I found this the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksFhXFuRblg "NBC Nightly News, June 24, 1975" I strongly urge people to watch this, it's 30 minutes but there are many very illuminating insights within. One word for you: Exxon.
While I was young in 1975, I did watch ABC's version of the news with my grandparents, and continued up through high school. Then in the late 1980s I got on the Internet and well you know the rest.
"Back Then", a high percentage of everybody I or my grandparents or my friends came into contact with watched one of ABC, NBC, or CBS news most nights. These three networks were a bit different, but they generally they all told the same basic stories as each other.
This was effectively our shared reality. Later in high school as I became more politically focused, I could still talk to anybody, even people who had completely opposite political views as myself. That's because we had a shared view of reality.
Today, tens of millions of people see the exact same footage of an officer involved shooting...many angles, and draw entirely different 'factual' conclusions.
So yes, 50 years ago, we in the United States generally had a share view of reality. That was good in a lot of ways, but it did essentially allow a small set of people in power to decide that convincing a non-trivial percentage of the US population that Exxon was a friendly, family oriented company that was really on your side.
Worth the trade off? Hard to say, but at least 'back then' it was possible, and even common, to have ground political discussions with people 'on the other side', and that's pretty valuable.
> 'back then' it was possible, and even common, to have ground political discussions with people 'on the other side'
As long as that common ground falls within acceptable parameters; couldn't talk too much about anything remotely socialist or being anti-war.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
I don't know if it's good or bad but, outside of some megahit films, people mostly don't regularly watch the same TV series. I don't even have live TV myself.
Planet Money recently released an episode that mentions some of these points around drop vs drip programming
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5646673/stranger-things...
This is why I like it when streaming services release one episode every week instead of dropping the whole season in one shot.
i hate the single season dumping at once for a big binge. it always feel like i'm plugging into the content trough and gorging myself to pass the hours.
you can't talk about a show with somebody until they're also done binging, so there's no fun discussion/speculation (the conversation is either "did you watch that? yeah. <conversation over>" or "you should watch this. <conversation over>".
The broadcast nature of it is something that I missed just last night. I was walking past several bars as the Seahawks won a big football game, but of course each spot was on a different stream delay so instead of one full-throated simultaneous cheer echoing across the neighborhood it was three or four quieter, distinct cheers spread over 20-30 seconds. Not really a big deal but still, it felt like a lesser experience to this aging millennial.
> It is not the same, quality-wise I think youtube is actually worse than e. g. the 1980s era
Is it though? I of course watched TV as a kid through the 80s and have some feelings of nostalgia about it, but is it true that YouTube today is worse?
I mean, YouTube is nothing in particular. There's all sorts of crap, but Sturgeon's Law [1] applies here. There is also good stuff, even gems, if you curate your content carefully. YouTube can be delightful if you know what to look for. If you don't filter, yeah... it's garbage.
----
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
There is many times more things on youtube than were ever on TV over it's entire lifetime up to the YT era, even discounting old TV show content on Youtube. But it also feels like the ratio of of good-to-shit has not remained constant between the two.
Definitely good stuff on YouTube, but I do miss the curation and, as was talked about here recently I believe, shared experiences that brought. I'm also crazy addicted to YouTube in a way that I wasn't to TV, but that's another issue.
Same as reddit pretty much. 98% is trash but good parts do exist.
Diving into new topics on YT is delightful. The site becomes much better with sponsorblock+ublock origin+hide shorts/trending (unhook or blocktube)+replace clickbait titles+replace thumbnails (dearrow)+return youtube dislike.
I've sometimes wondered how things would have been different if the TV pioneers had went with circular CRTs instead of rounded rectangles.
Circles would have had a couple of advantages. First, I believe they would have been easier to make. From what I've read rectangles have more stress at the corners. Rounding the corners reduces that but it is still more than circles have. With circles they could have more easily made bigger CRTs.
Second, there is no aspect ratio thus avoiding the whole problem of picking an aspect ratio.
Electronically the signals to the XY deflectors to scan a spiral out from the center (or in from the edge if you prefer) on a circle are as easy to make as the signals to to scan in horizontal lines on a rectangle.
As far as I can tell that would have been fine up until we got computers and wanted to use TV CRTs as computer displays. I can't imagine how to build a bitmapped interface for such a CRT that would not be a complete nightmare to deal with.
I would guess that even at the time a circular viewport would have seemed a bit weird and so rectangular was preferred. After all, theater stages, most windows, photographs and books - all common place - aren’t circular either.
Futurism of the time was all about round shapes though.
Picture tubes started round, and then became rectangular:
https://www.earlytelevision.org/prewar_crts.html
They didn't really have the problem of picking an aspect ratio because motion pictures existed and that was already 4:3
Regarding aspect ratio, I'd bet they would have explored oval shapes before long.
Reminds me of how every single piece of paper on Battlestar Galactica has the corners cut off. Somewhere in their timeline paper became 8 sided, and it's just as odd as our 4 side paper and rectangular TVs
Whoa. Guess I need to watch the entire series again :)
Circles don’t pack together well. And they need a different solution for standing up.
Circle tube, rectangle case.
The issue is not so much that you can't pack them at all but any packing solution is going to waste a lot of space in the truck compared to a bunch of box shaped TVs.
Neil Postman's theory still holds up and is extended to the Internet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
> In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence.
And modern America asked itself, why can't it be both?
Early television was a hotbed of hacker/hobbyist DIY experimentation much like early radio and early personal computers. The first issue of "Television Magazine" from 1928 (https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=37097) has a remarkably similar vibe to 1970s computer zines (https://archive.org/details/kilobaudmagazine-1977-01/).
For example, page 26 has directions on how to pop by the local chemist to pick up materials to make your own selenium cell (your first imager) and page 29 covers constructing your first Televisor, including helpful tips like "A very suitable tin-plate is ... the same material out of which biscuit tins and similar light tinware is made. It is easily handled and can readily be cut with an ordinary pair of scissors. It is sold in sheets of 22 inches by 30 inches. Any ironmonger will supply these."
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is the book that comes to mind with this article link. 2 years ago my wife and I took the TV off the wall. My kids don't have Bluey or the latest Disney cartoon to keep them company. I am not going back... It has been the most blissful time. Amazing that the TV is not required to lead a thriving life despite what the incessant sales-industrial-complex will tell you.
Ew. Reeks more of a paranoid victim complex than true embodied virtue. I’d consider therapy there uh bud
The Baird vs Farnsworth debate reminds me of similar discussions in tech. The first demo rarely becomes the dominant standard.
What strikes me is how fast the iteration was. Baird went from hatboxes and bicycle lenses to color TV prototypes in just two years. That's the kind of rapid experimentation we're seeing with AI right now, though compressed even further.
Does anyone here still have television? Ever since I moved out of my parents house (15 years ago), I never had a TV subscription. I did own a TV screen, but only to run apps like Netflix and Youtube. I'd rather have a simple monitor without the TV options to do so, but strangely that never existed or was too expensive.
Edit: to make it clear, I absolutely did not miss having TV for even a second in all of those years.
I am not really sure what you mean by "have television" - I, as I assume many here, have a TV "screen" as you put it, but it's used for Apple TV apps, home media server viewing, Netflix, and video games. I actually do have a digital antenna with it but never use it. I think the only time I have in the last 10 years or so was to watch one olympic event last summer.
Over here in some European countries TV license fee is mandatory even if you don't own a set. The licence funds watchable content, so it makes sense to have one. (I kind-of pity the US and other countries without a strong public TV system). Actually I have access to three TV markets via satellite (which includes UK with the BBC) and the amount of good content free to receive and record it much better than what Netflix offers. (Of course, nothing can match youtube)
BTW, I also still have a CRT in constant use - but the sources are now digital (It's my kitchen background TV - I feed it from a Raspberry PI with Kodi). On great thing about CRTs is that there's no computer inside monitoring what you watch.
> The licence funds watchable content
If everyone agreed with that you wouldn't have to force them to pay the license and could sell subscriptions instead.
> I kind-of pity the US and other countries without a strong public TV system
I don't. At least they don't have to pay for their propaganda.
> Actually I have access to three TV markets via satellite (which includes UK with the BBC) and the amount of good content free to receive and record it much better than what Netflix offers.
That's like saying dumpster diving gets you better food than the sewers.
> On great thing about CRTs is that there's no computer inside monitoring what you watch.
Weird tangent when there are plenty of computer monitors based on non-CRT technologies. If CRTs were still being made today they wouldn't have any less anti-features.
Colloquially called “the idiot box” in Australia.
I remember asking as a teenager if that because there are idiots on the box, or because you turn into one when you watch it.
The answer is “yes”
Have not had or watched one in well over 20 years.
I have some sort of old flat screen TV, which I bought before there were "smart" TVs. But I don't have cable or over-the-air reception. Instead I have a Roku soundbar with Netflix, Apple TV+, and Youtube apps (plus some other apps that I don't use, like Tubi and Pluto). I haven't had cable or over-the-air reception for ~18 years.
I can't watch anything live unless Youtube is showing some live event (which it sometimes does). I could probably watch some live news using Pluto, but I never do.
My mom still pays for cable, so since I live with her I suppose I have it by proxy. When I move out I'll still be buying one of those digital OTA antennas because I don't watch enough tv to justify a streaming service or cable, and sometimes it's nice to just watch something that's on without much of a choice
Kept a few mini portable CRTs. I don't have any CRT monitors though.. sold my beloved diamondtron to a movie editor, sadly transporter probably shook it too hard and the device wasn't operating on arrival (at to refund the guy and lose the screen, double whammy)
I have a device marketed as a TV which I use to watch movies as well as serial entertainment that was originally released on television. I don't use any kind of broadcast, cable or streaming service though.
I still have an antenna to watch football and the Olympics live. Everything else is streamed.
The device? Absolutely. Cable service? Absolutely not.
The device is fantastic. Games, movies, shows, etc. There's a lot of utility in having a big, high-resolution screen as compared to a computer screen or, worse, a tiny phone screen. I love getting to relax on a couch and watch a favorite movie.
Cable and streaming are crap. Every year the prices go up, the content gets more fractured, the experience and service get worse, and it's just a bad time. I'm sick of promising new shows getting cancelled after 2 seasons. I'm sick of ENDLESS budget being spent on the most absurd CGI and effects instead of making something simpler and focused more on the story.
I have a TV because it's a nicer group experience than everyone viewing something via their personal device - whether that is cuddling up with a partner on the couch to watch a movie, or crowding around the TV with friends to play 8-way Super Smash Bros.
I got rid of mine. Predictable mind numbing content. I do stream occasionally but I have not paid a TV licence in over twenty years.
Odd we never adapted to it.
Video has a strange hypnotic power over most people and messages seem to bypass normal mental defenses.
I'd say we did, you need more and more for the same effect.
Here is the first ad ever, for a watch : https://youtu.be/ho2OJfXkvpI
For comparison, here is the latest ad for the best selling watch as of today : https://youtu.be/kdMTc5WfnkM
In case anyone accuses you of not comparing like to like, even a contemporary Bulova commercial is much more similar to the latter than the former: https://youtu.be/trp7p634qAU?si=fGvyxHp_cayuw5xa
Everyone's trying too hard to stand out, but honestly the first one would stand out more today, despite being a still image!
My thoughts exactly. Apple could probably go viral with the original style of ad today.
I'm not sure it is valid to use the first ad ever as a basis for comparison. At this time it was a novelty to even have a television – of course an incredibly basic ad would work. And how much do you think they had to pay for an ad on a very new technology? I doubt much.
Wow, I haven't watched any ads for a while and that was pretty jarring.
I don't care to start a debate about who first invented television when, but I remember hearing (conformed by wikipedia [1]) that Leon Theremin, inventor of the musical instrument named after him, demonstrated mechanical television at roughly the same time.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin
Funny you bring Leon Theremin up. I just showed a friend of mine The Thing[0] today.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
I still only have CRT, No matter how much i browse shopping sites or visit showrooms, i cannot make up my mind buying newer tv, lcd, led, plasma, oled etc, so much new technologies have arrived but i have'nt tried them for TV Yet as of today
My tv's have gone through real stress test in real life unlike factories
During childhood, we had our tv Switched on in morning 4:00 till 22:00 at night, constantly being watched 16-18 hrs a day during weekends and vacations (45 days), while least 10hrs a day during weekdays , for last 22 years
I only had 2 crt in my 30yrs of lifetime, Sansui and Samsung, channel broadcasters being changed from Tetrestrial Channels --> FTA Antenna --> Cable Tv --> Satellite Dish from time to time
Newer tv cannot cope up with such lenghty watchtimes,
Still RCA Only, no HDMI, Tv still have its Radio Antenna port on top
I think it was because old TVs already had wide gamut, so sRGB meant a significant reduction. It never was "contrast" as such. Anything made today is vastly better than any CRT.
CRTs are a very interesting display technology with their refresh rate and clarity. I'd like to see an "HD" CRT someday, and however many tons it would weigh!
PC monitors were already HD. If you have the chance, watch a HD video on a big enough PC monitor, the picture quality is quite impressive.
Until very recently I had a Bang and Olufsen CRT, and it was by far the best picture I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately “small” (32”) yet simultaneously weighed a ton.
There’s some that have high resolution. There were some consumer 1080i sets I think.
How do you feel about having so much screentime?
[dead]
Only 100 years old. Wow. I mean you know the world has changed rapidly but it's hard to get perspective enough to really feel that change. Something about it only having been 100 years since televsion really does that for me.
Television, arguably, can be blamed for the near-total degradation of civic life and, subsequently, human liberty. By substituting the unilateral flow of images for the dialogue of the community, television enforces a banking concept of reality where we are reduced to passive receptacles, stripping us of the bridging social capital necessary to resist domination.
This privatization of leisure generates a vicious circle of isolation, transforming the active citizen into a member of a lonely crowd. In this atomized state, we lose our mētis—the practical, situated knowledge essential for self-governance—and become vulnerable to the high-modernist state's imposition of simplified, legible grids upon our lives. Furthermore, the media inundates us with the myths, preventing us from naming the world for ourselves. To break this cycle, we must move from submissiveness to a liberating praxis that reclaims our time to build alternative social institutions and counterhegemony through direct, face-to-face cooperation.
Why, even here on Hacker News we've corroborated my position regarding the necessity of breaking the "spectacle" through direct, generative action. On a recent thread about the "loneliness epidemic," HN folks argued that the epidemic is not merely an individual failing but a structural byproduct of a "death spiral" where digital convenience and "behavior modification schemes" have cannibalized the "real world". The community identifies that the privatization of leisure—manifested in car-centric suburban sprawl and the erasure of "third places"—has stripped us of the capacity for spontaneous encounter, leaving us waiting for "nicely packaged solutions" rather than facing the "great unknown" of human connection. Consequently, the proposed remedy aligns precisely: individuals must transition from passive consumers to active "Hosts", building "alternative social institutions" like non-profit event platforms that reject "dark patterns", organizing "physical social networks" on street corners, or reclaiming public spaces through guerilla cleanup efforts, effectively proving that we must "stop waiting for someone else" to reconstruct the civic dialogue.
Having just finished my software-defined analog video decoder[0], I've gotta say, my mind is thoroughly blown by just how much of an engineering achievement television must've been at the time when it was invented. It must have also been the first ever communication system to have backwards compatibility.
[0] https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/blob/master/AVDecod...
Cool project. Anything in particular that you use it for? There are some great films or TV series that were never released in digital form and some more where the digital releases were butchered in some way (e.g. cropped) compared to the original analog broadcast / VHS / Laserdisc releases.
I made this to teach myself about digital signal processing and scratch an itch I had for a long time, starting back when these technologies were still current.
> Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects.
This idea is why I always take media with a grain of salt. The decontexualization makes it easy for people to be reactive towards something, that isn’t logical
Eg “now this is why <insert person or group> is good/evil”
People call me the devils advocate when I point out these nuances but I just think we need to be much more critical when forming and holding opinions.
Your example isn’t what your quote is referring to.
“Now this” is just a segue between unrelated topics.
Eg “and now a word from our sponsors”.
Isn't "now this" just a synonym for "moving on" or "next order of business" or "apropos of nothing"? I don't think the concept of jumping to a completely new topic is something TV introduced.
It’s been a bit since I’ve read Amusing Ourselves to Death but I believe in the book the phrase ”Now this” is used disparagingly to refer to the fact that with tv you can go from a horrific news story like a local family being murdered to a completely unrelated story, both in content and emotion in the span of seconds. This doesn’t allow ample time for the viewer to process the former and essentially forces them to turn their brain off as the cognitive dissonance of holding both stories (and more) simultaneously would be impossible.
That's fair. It does seem pretty similar to just reading a newspaper and moving your eyes to the next story, but I get that TV is a lot more stimulating and you can't go at your own pace like you can with the paper.
What are you quoting?
Sounds like something from Neil Postman’s excellent book Amusing Ourselves to Death.
I owned a TV for aproximatly 30 seconds, when an obnoxtious roomy sold me theres for $20, thinking they could still watch there horrid shit, but I promptly threw it off the balcony. Obviously doing this with a screen, but I have zero "accounts" for social media that are not text based, and block everything by default. My basic practice is to resist and avoid asymetric situations that are not defined by a negotiated contract or agreament, up or down.
funny story - I had a job recently that installed DirecTV setups for mostly retirement communities. On almost every service call, I'd show up and 95% of the time, without fail, they'd either be watching Fox News, CNN, or CNBC. It was quite depressing to see 24/7 news stations had completely consumed their lives and became the majority of topics of conversation while I was there.
I eventually quit the job. I decided I didn't want to be a part of making our society worse by installing these devices that were causing manufactured outrage, hate, and selective truth telling.
Soon after I left, I found a book while thrifting that came out in 1978 called "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" by Jerry Mander. I laughed at the title and couldn't believe someone was already arguing for the detriments of TV before I was born. It's very well written and the points he makes are still relevant today.
From the wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...
Mander believes that "television and democratic society are incompatible" due to television removing all of society's senses except for seeing and hearing. The author states that television makes it so that people have no common sense which leads to...being "powerless to reject the camera's line of sight, reset the stage, or call on our own sensory apparatus to correct the doctored sights and sounds the machine delivers".
Mander's four arguments in the book to eliminate television are:
1. that telecommunication removes the sense of reality from people,
2. television promotes capitalism,
3. television can be used as a scapegoat, and
4. that all three of these issues negatively work together.
Reminds me of Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985), in which he argues that TV as a medium is fundamentally incapable of producing anything other than entertainment. So things like news, political discussion, or any other type of educational programming can only exist on TV as a nutrition-less pantomime of the real thing.
Education, real education, can be made entertaining. Mythbusters and Connections (I believe it was called) both qualify. As do some historic documentaries.
Related: Baird's Mechanical Television
https://paleotronic.com/2018/09/15/gadget-graveyard-bairds-m...
Also this site, which shows how the recorded Phonovision broadcasts were eventually recovered:
http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-19...
It’s been a bit since I’ve read Amusing Ourselves to Death but I believe in the book the phrase ”Now this” is used disparagingly to refer to the fact that with tv you can go from a horrific news story like a local family being murdered to a completely unrelated story, both in content and emotion in the span of seconds. This doesn’t allow ample time for the viewer to process the former and essentially forces them to turn their brain off as the cognitive dissonance of holding both stories (and more) simultaneously would be impossible.
My late father told me the first time he saw a TV. He was in Ann Arbor, Michigan making a sales call in 1947. When he drove in he noticed there was a huge crowd around a store window but couldn't see what was going on.
After making the call he noticed the crowd was still there so he parked his car and decided to investigate. There was a black and white TV broadcasting a Detroit Tigers game in the window of a radio repair shop. He told me that he came away impressed.
I remember a similar story from my father, of people in the small town he was in crowding standing in the front yard of a neighbor, crowding around a picture window to look in at the first TV in town in the mid-1950's.
When I was born my parents bought a TV. Back then it was sold as a way of enhancing the education of children. I remember the early days of the web when the same case was made. Pretty sure you could have predicted it would descend to the lowest common denominator ;<).
The family stayed with black and white until the late seventies. I remember the entire family watching the first moon landing. For the longest time I didn't know whether NASA was recording in color or not ;<).
Thanks to TV you will no longer have to travel around the world to attend lectures. From the comfort of your home you can watch professors talk about cutting edge developments. It will be a revolution in education. Everyone will embrace the sciences! We will progress into the information age!
It's not their exact words and I also forgot who said it. It's probably better for them we don't remember.
Watching Dallas on a Tuesday evening with the entire family gathered in our parents' bedroom with me and brother and sister at the end of the bed on the floor watching the latest schemes of JR Ewing and poor hapless brother Bobby.
We never had the TV set in the lounge - it was meant for special occasions like tea and cake for family gatherings.
We still have a TV but it hardly used - everybody has iPads in the house.
On the one hand I look at some tech lifecycles and feel everything moves so slow (cars, energy and train infrastructure etc..). And then I look at other stuff and I cannot phantom that someone who was born 100 years ago saw a TV (or media electronic screen) from conception to modern miracle. As someone in his 20s I can't imagine what I'll see in the next 80 years!
Unfortunately technological progress is not always exponential. An human landed on the moon 56 years ago and people back then thought space travel would be a routine thing today so it'll be interesting to see how things go
I had a look at the Gemini capsule in the Smithsonian a few years ago. I was shocked at how primitive the controls looked.
It's certainly not routine, but I'd say the privatization of the space industry that's unfolded over the last few decades is significant progress.
When I get depressed and look out at the world, I'm actually amazed at what I'm living through—the internet, space travel, electric and autonomous cars, smartphones. It's really amazing.
"Progress" towards what? The average dystopian sci-fi story where the galaxy is ruled by mega-corporations?
SpaceEx has made a ton of progress in space travel, granted it's not an ideal situation with it being a mega corp, but it moved a hell of a lot faster than NASA could have.
Perhaps someday we'll have individualized space flight like we have ownership over our cars and private planes.
Don't know what you're getting at by saying the galaxy will be ruled by mega-corps. Seems pretty democratic so far, and most of the things achieved couldn't have been without organization.
> As someone in his 20s I can't imagine what I'll see in the next 80 years!
All of these rapid technological advancements are a function of tremendous increases in energy available .
We passed peak conventional oil years ago and only see proven reserves increase because we redefined 'shale oil' as included under proven reserves. But shale oil has much lower EROEI than traditional oil. We can already see geopolitics heating up before our eyes to capture and control what remains, but to continue to advance society we need more energy.
On top of this we are just now starting to feel the impacts of the effects of the byproducts of this energy usage: climate change. What we are experiencing now is only a slight hint of what is to come in recent years.
In the next 80 years we'll very likely see an incredible decline in technology as certain complex systems no longer have adequate energy to maintain. The climate will continue to worsen and in more extreme ways, while geopolitics melts down in a struggle for the last bits of oil and fossil fuels (interestingly these combine in the fight for Greenland because a soon-to-be ice free arctic holds lots of oil, not enough to advance civilization the way it has been going, but enough to keep yours running if you can keep everyone else away).
I sincerely suspect within the next 80 years we will see the full collapse of industrial civilization and very possibly the near or complete extinction of the human race. You can see the early stages of this beginning to unfold right now.
I don't think we'll see a decline in technology globally but there will definitely be some regressions in countries that put feel good politics over the energy needs of their citizens.
High definition is nearly 90 years old? I guess their definition of high is quite low by more modern standards.
Analogue interlaced-scan TV systems like PAL and SECAM were actually ''higher'' definition in relation to NTSC by visual line count, although the former's 25Hz refresh rate was noticeable for flickering compared to NTSC's ~30Hz, which was much closer to the human eye's comfort level.
There was a prototype 819-line analogue ''high definition'' system used to record The T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, with excellent results, but the recordings were committed to film for distribution since there was no apparatus for broadcasting it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.A.M.I._Show
There were also experiments by NHK of Japan with analogue HD broadcasting, but digital TV was so close on the horizon that it was mooted.
''High definition'' has been a relative term in the professional TV world all along, but became consumer buzzwords with the advent of digital TV in the early 2000's. Nowadays we know it to mean 720, 1080, or higher lines, usually in progressive scan.
> Analogue interlaced-scan TV systems like PAL and SECAM were actually ''higher'' definition in relation to NTSC by visual line count, although the former's 25Hz refresh rate was noticeable for flickering compared to NTSC's ~30Hz, which was much closer to the human eye's comfort level.
Yet motion pictures are still stuck at 24 FPS to this day and there are even people who have strong opinions about this being a good thing.
Also just because NTSC was 29.97 Hz doesn't mean that the video content actually was - almost everything shot on film was actually effectively 23.97 Hz - telecined to 59.94 fields per second but that doesn't actually change the number of unique full frames.
Going from 30 lines to 300 lines is a big leap!
Cinema was "HD" by design. So, in some way, 35mm movies are HD quality and predate PAL and NTSC standards.
Sure, but that's not TV.
Related to discussion on Baird vs. Farnsworth, there's a plaque honoring Farnsworth on Green Street in San Francisco. https://noehill.com/sf/landmarks/cal0941.asp
There is also a statue in the Presidio https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/27928
1897 Boris Rosing of Russia showed moving image using cathode ray tube.
Inventor status is a bit murky: https://farnovision.com/wp/no-iconoscope-in-1923/
The interesting question (to me) is how directly a line can be drawn from the original invention to what we in modern times think of as “the thing”?
As an example, the Wright brothers built a biplane that had wing warping instead of ailerons and a canard design. That bears little resemblance to most modern airplanes, but people have little trouble crediting it as “the invention of the airplane” —- questions of whether the Wrights were first or not notwithstanding.
Can ”TV” be thus simplified so that an electromechanical device with spinning discs qualifies?
The invention of the "airplane" is just a simplified term for "controlled and sustained powered flight".
Which the Wrights did with both controlled and powered in the 1903 Flyer.
(The Wrights invented the first 3-axis control system, and designed & built the first aviation engine capable of sustained flight.)
While the Wrights were first, by several years, its invention was inevitable.
> The invention of the "airplane" is just a simplified term for "controlled and sustained powered flight"
Maybe? But most people think of it as "invented the airplane," and the two terms have different connotations in common use. Likewise, the title here says "television," not "real-time capture, transmission, and display of moving images" -- and similarly, I think the terms have different connotations.
People who do not have a technical education tend to have a less precise definition of things. There's not a great deal of point to arguing semantics.
There were precursors to Edison's light bulb, and people use that to denigrate Edison's achievement. But the technical reality of the Edison bulb is his bulb was practical, and the precursors were just curiosities.
> Edison
Sure, and (as far as I know) Edison's basic pattern at discovery was much the same as what we use today (less so these days obviously):
I think the same can be said for the Wright brothers -- perhaps less so for the reasons I gave previously.I think a system that involves mechanical elements is farther from what most people think of when they think "TV"
I have mixed feelings about television and no longer have one. Some great series but also tonnes and tonnes of forgettable and insulting trash.
I think television has had a negative effect on community and social interaction.
Love the name of the blog!
I think that LCD screens, huge digital bandwidth, and CCD sensors, have turned video ("television"), into a vast new landscape.
I'm old enough to remember putting foil on the rabbit-ears...
for every episode of the A-Team, for Saturday morning cartoons, for I Love Lucy, and for Miami Vice, I give thanks.
Edit: And Star Trek, and Cosmos
Diamonds on a dung heap. For every good series which we love there are dozens of terrible/forgettable ones.
A shame since TV has so much potential as a medium.
I think this is likely to be true for every artistic creation that requires lots of capital and widespread human coordination. Ultimately for a TV show to be great many, many things have to go right, and much of what could go wrong happens after the money is spent and the air date is already assured. I'm grateful we've had so many great things, certainly far more than I'll have time to watch in my life. But I'm not a heavy TV viewer.
TV has a fairly bad record of keeping shows that are already shown to be good alive though because good does not equate profitable for the network or individual decision makers (which are again no the same thing).
That's just one of the things that has to go right: marketing, finding the audience, being in the right places and place in time for your target viewers, etc.
I think the problem nowadays is that there are so many channels and so much space to fill. TV runs 24/7 now on hundreds of channels. In many cases, it isn't worth the while of a small channel to make an expensive programme as they would lose money.
Sometimes, the "wrong" programme is the hit. I know the History Channel started off with serious documentaries (some of them excellent quality) which not enough people watched. They then tried Nazis and Ancient Egypt, but it seems to be "Ancient Aliens" which is their biggest hit. Its version of history is questionable, to say the least.
How many people even watch TV "channels" these days? Seems most people have moved to a la carte streaming services. I don't really like either myself and prefer local copies of films but seem to be in a very small minority there.
I've been having a lot of trouble with Amazon Prime. I specifically have it so that I can download films and watch them offline when I don't have internet, and yet the player keeps glitching. I do prefer physical media because at least I'm owning it instead of just hiring it.
Yeah, I don't really consider it a local copy when I can't play it in a player of my choice on any device I want. I'd be fine with digital files (although having a movie shelf is nice) but that isn't really an option so physical media (ripped to a hard disk for convenience) it is.
Well, A-Team was objectively terrible but I have a nostalgic connection to kids shows like that, Knight Rider etc. In retrospect Bay Watch was an effective CPR training tool at unprecedented scale.
I would be hesitant to pass judgement.
The A Team was objectively terrible, but I think it had a good main cast and never pretended to be anything it wasn't. Ditto Knight Rider.
I think Glen Larson was behind both of these.
Baywatch was often terrible, but many of us watched for other reasons.
Terrible shows are still better than actively malicious ones.
Blogger was new when TV was 75 years old. Glad to see it's still around.
Long live the new flesh
It did always strike me as funny that Cronenberg had a movie about "what if TV was evil and made people murderous and the studio execs had to pay", and a movie about "what if video games were evil and made people murderous and their creators had to pay", but never a movie about "what if movies were evil and made people murderous and film directors had to pay". Obvious bias aside I wonder if it would work as a story - movies don't seem as hypnotic in the public consciousness, I believe.
The game one being eXistenZ? Only recently got to see Videodrome and quite liked it so will check it out.
My buddy has an old Portacolor, but it's only 60.
Only 100 years. Less than even Leica ? Wow!
In interesting plot point in the novel/movie Contact (early, so not much of a spoiler):
> […] This puts her at odds with much of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who pushes to defund SETI. Eventually, the project detects a signal from Vega, 26 light-years away, transmitting prime numbers.[a][b] Further analysis reveals a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's 1936 Olympic speech, the first TV signal to escape Earth's ionosphere.[1]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(novel)
Inspired one of my absolute favorite Zappa grooves.
I am the Slime
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCQcEW98OY
I am gross and perverted
I'm obsessed and deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I'm the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you
I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I'm the slime oozin' out
From your TV set
You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help, no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold
That's right, folks
Don't touch that dial
Well, I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor
I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go
I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor
I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Frank Zappa
I'm The Slime lyrics © Munchkin Music Co
Another important person in creation of the TV technology was Vladimir Zworykin [0]. He developed cathode-ray tube based TV transmission devices that he patented in 1923 and 1925.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_K._Zworykin
> It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.
- David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction
Really? But Marquee Moon isn't even 50 years old yet. What were they doing for the first 50?
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Thank you Mr. Farnsworth.
Philo Farnsworth did make considerable contribution to television with his image dissector, but he didn't make the first TV. He was the first TV patent holder in the US though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television#History
And in Futurama, a man with the same family name invents a universal remote. The [drumroll] longer finger!