About 1940 to today - TV - Sunday Morning Thoughts

[Marc]

I was born in 1950 so this article has some good memories for me:

https://my.firedoglake.com/cmaukonen/2013/08/03/when-we-still-made-stuff-geek-edition/

I remember a lot of stuff I had forgotten, such as our local Lafayette store (early Radioshack). My father did repairs such as tube replacements. I was too young to remember our first TV, but I remember it took a few years in the early 1960's to convince my father to buy a color TV.

I do remember the first Sony trinitron we got. It was a really nice TV.

As an aside, I haven't had a TV in quite a few years now.

Anyway - Just something some of you might be interested in reading on a sunday morning.

 

[Bill Pflanz]

I was born in1951 and have no memory of not having a television. Tv repair was common and he would bring a luggage size box of tubes to fix it. The early color tv was still mainly b&w because only a few shows were in color. I still own the radio I bought in 1970 and it also has tubes.

 

[Marc]

I was just thinking that - I have no memory of not having a TV either. In contrast I can remember my father telling me about when he was young seeing the first airplane he ever saw fly over him. Of course, in those days steamboats were still plying the rivers and diesel locomotives were yet to come.

 

[Ninja]

As an aside, I haven't had a TV in quite a few years now.

Wow...I thought I was the only one!!

I shut mine off in 1998 when I went to grad school...and just never turned it back on.

When my wife and I rebuilt the outside of our house in 2004, we pulled all the utilities off the house, resided it, and we left the cable hanging on the utility pole ... we just never hooked it back up.

Cheers to TV-less few !

 

[Marc]

I had one until about 10 years ago. It was a big old CRT that weighed about 70 pounds or more. It took 2 people to comfortably, safely lift it and move it. A Sanyo, if I remember correctly. It was about 10 years old. I gave it to a friend and went total computer.

I do Netflix streaming but that's about it. Of course there are a lot of online videos in general. I keep thinking about buying a big screen TV but I end up just watching video on a 27" iMac which is on my desk.

So - I can't claim I never watch videos. I just don't have cable or satellite or local OTA. I have thought about putting up an antenna but there just isn't anything compelling me to want access to the local OTA channels.

I do have a lot of videos. Some are like these: (broken link removed)

 

[MIREGMGR]

No self-contained TV here either. My last actual TV was about 30 years ago.

I have a large projector system in the "living" (traditional term) room, in addition to the desktop monitors in my office, all driven by videocards of one sort or another via an HDMI network. I used to have two analog TV tuners...an ancient SVHS VCR and a computer card of a forgotten brand. I never got around to getting a digital tuner, not having watched any OTA broadcast content for years anyway.

I have access to all the news and other real time content I want from the net. I have BluRay, DVD and a several-TB media server for anything else I want to watch.

I do have a digital-capable antenna on a rotor-mast, there's (non-live) Comcast cable physically run to the house from the previous owner, and AT&T would be delighted to put cable-equivalent content on my net connection and double my monthly bill, so I could get set up quite quickly if I wanted to. So far I haven't felt the need.