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First, repairing locally is cheaper than sending stuff halfway around the globe. Repair shops would pop up quickly where people with the skill to repair sell that skill to those that need it.

Depends entirely on what's being repaired. Let's imagine I want to open a repair shop in San Francisco. To pay the shop's rent, taxes, utilities, a salary for myself and everything else I discover I need to charge $150 / hour + parts.

So someone brings in a TV for repair with a power supply problem, and you tell them the cost for the repair (labor and parts) will be $200. Most people will just say "never mind, I'll just go buy a new TV.:"

Why were there TV repair men in 1968? Because a 23" color TV cost $2500 in today's dollars. Back then it was cheaper to repair it.

http://www.tvhistory.tv/1968-A...

Nope
http://www.tvhistory.tv/1950-5...

20 million TV sets for a population of 150 million- almost 50 million of whom were children. So about 1/5 households had TV's by 1953.

By 1959 it was over 67 million TV sets. It was explosive.

I think that must be hyperbole on your part to say a TV cost a year's salary. Here are some TV prices from the tube days. You can plug these numbers into a CPI adjuster (too bad they didn't do that for us). For example, you get $2,078.04 for the 1960 17" BW Tabletop Philco. I chose that one because we were still using something comparable when I was a real little kid in the early 70s. A PC cost about that much for a long time. Not cheap, but not ridiculous either.

Some of the other sets on that list do indeed cost quite a bit more in real terms--but few people would have purchased expensive color sets in the 1950s because most broadcasts were BW. The expensive consoles also pulled double-duty as furniture. I remember seeing these sets in people's homes, and some of them had extra space on the side where you could put your turntable and records. You'd put stuff on top of the set. Man, that was a lifetime purchase so of course you'd shell out more. Nobody ever wanted to *move* those things, but I digress.

Look at the prices in the early 70s. By then, "solid state" sets were available, but repair shops were still going at it with solder guns.

The 21" 1960 RCA color table top is $4131.04 in today's dollars. Definitely a pretty penny; but also for early adopters only. Five years after that purchase, only half of all network broadcasts were in color

I think the idea that TV sets were really expensive came from the frugality of the generation that was purchasing them--WW2 generation. They'd been through the Depression with radio. That colored their thinking, no pun intended. Also, sets were financed which makes it sound like they must have been really expensive; but buying appliances on "the installment plan" seemed like something that was being pushed a lot back then. I think it was part of the hard sell to get frugal customers to pry open their wallets.

http://www.tvhistory.tv/TV-Lens.htm

That's not really true. By the late 50's you could find a B&W TV for less than $200, roughly $1500 in today's dollars. The average new car in 1960 cost $2600. I doubt $200 would buy a car that could actually run. http://www.tvhistory.tv/tv-prices.htm (See: '56 GE $129 (14"))

1. US population in 1950 was 151,325,798 and in 1960 179,323,175, An iPhone at $300 today is equal to 40 dollars in 1960, while 40 wasn't disposable then, a color table top was about 500 dollars- '60 RCA: $495 (21") or $3,635.88 today

http://www.tvhistory.tv/tv-prices.htm
http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm

2. You can't do that while mobile, which is what an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad do, so it's Apples and Oranges

3. Its really the Flash/HTML 5 argument. Until Windows and Linux go mobile with this big of an installed base, theres no point in bringing them into this

5. Yes, its a stupid article. /. keeps posting Apple articles because Cmdr Taco went Apple back...oh...around the time 10.1 or 10.2 came out. And believe or not but alot of techies use Apples, not just fanbois. My entire state agency is Apple.

And this was very interesting reading:
http://www.tvhistory.tv/1938-Scophony-UK.htm

So double reply faux paus. Anyway, here is a list of prices that looks at least reasonable, and in 1982, a 26" CRT apparently cost at least $1,000:

http://www.tvhistory.tv/tv-prices.htm

So maybe I do need to resort to including inflation.

It means that the market chose to not buy the CBS product that the FCC had mandated as the new color TV standard

There was no CBS consumer product. But closed circuit CBS color broadcasts of operations were were a staple of medical conventions from 1948-1956. 1948 Zenith - USA

The point is that the transmission system that the BBC used was capable of being received by multiple receivers at the time (see http://sydenham.org.uk/john_logie_baird_00.html). In 1936, there were two competing transmission methods (Baird and Marconi-EMI), but there were seven different receivers available (if you were rich) - see http://www.tvhistory.tv/1935-1941.htm for a selection of manufacturers. This completely contrasts with current situation where the transmission method is heavily encumbered and is wholly owned by a convicted monopolist. I don't see how Microsoft's DRM is considered the standard for DRM when it isn't even clearly documented - it cannot be a standard when only one company can implement it. Looking to the future, I don't see how I will be able to receive iPlayer broadcasts on a variety of devices (PSP, mobile phones, watches etc) if it's controlled by Microsoft, however I can easily use RealPlayer on a variety of devices. I agree that there isn't a decent cross-platform DRM solution, but surely that's because DRM is a doomed idea. As a British citizen, I want my BBC license fee to be used for the creation of culture, not the locking down of it.

Just so long as you don't employ any devices for avoiding commercials - they might be in violation of the DMCA!

Taking in account that it took 20 years for televisions to sell about 70 millions sets on US (source. I don't have stats for radio and phone sets, but 100 million units is an impressive feat regardless of substitution pieces or upgrades.

Taking in account that it took 20 years for televisions to sell about 70 millions sets on US (source. I don't have stats for radio and phone sets, but 100 million units is an impressive feat regardless of substitution pieces or upgrades.

The experience for most buyers will be:

Their first wide screen set.
Their first with multichannel digital sound.
Their first experience with very large screen direct view or projection TV
---the big screen sells HD and HD sells the big screen
Their first replacement of a CRT as their primary television. Once you make this choice, you don't look back.

When color TV was introduced in the U.S. in 1954, the price tag was $1000 for a 21 inch screen and only NBC was broadcasting in color, a few hours of special event programming a week.Television History - The First 75 Years

It would take ten years for color to become mass market, with no significant technological improvements other than the first tentative moves into the use of circuit boards and transistors.

There's also the factor of broadcast TV serving as a public address system in situations of crisis or danger.

Once analog is gone, there is only radio as a 'universal' platform.

That puts our 'public readiness' factor back to the pre-WWII levels.

http://www.tvhistory.tv/1951%20CBS%20Color2.htm

Here are some links to the history of television.

Hell, looks like nothing's changed since 1936!!!

I think it would be more accurate to say that the military is still the leader in DEVELOPING such technology, while the porn industry is the leader of finding innovative uses for such technology.

Yes, the military was responsible for many previous inventions. See my other replay for why the military lost that lead in the 90s

The porn industry didn't invent the VCR or the net, they just figured out some awesome ways to use it.

I don't think that the military developed or drove the invention of the VCR . Video tape recording inventions were driven by broadcasters and consumer electronics. At least, I doubt that Japanese companies had the military in mind when JVC introduces VHS in 1976 in Japan and Sony invented Betamax.

At best, one could say the (German) military played a role in moving magnetic recording out of the lab -- I'm not sure if the Danish inventor of magnetic recording was military-motivated. But the military's role in developing new recording media ended decades ago. CDs, DVDs, Flash Memory were developed by consumer electronics makers and not for military needs.

I'm not even sure that one could say that the military developed that much of the net. They certainly contributed a bunch of money to it (for which I thank them). And the whole route-around-damage feature is definitely military in origin. But I suspect that a truly military-developed internet would not be fragile to the array of viruses, DDoS attacks, DNS fragility, spoofing, smurfing, etc. that the current net seems prone to (At least I hope not).

My premise is that the military has ceased to the the driver of innovation that it once was and that it lost its leadership in the early 90s. Once technology became inexpensive and widely adopted, consumer and business applications outstripped military applications as the driver for innovation and development in the world.

P.S. Love your sig -- hope this reply does not taunt the "happy fun ball" ;)

Sell your set to a museum. The first electronic set was thought to be the twelve inch Model 180 du Mont, of which 4 are known to exist.
But it now seems that your grandma was truly an early adopter, who snapped up a set 5 years before regular television service began

Sell your set to a museum. The first electronic set was thought to be the twelve inch Model 180 du Mont, of which 4 are known to exist.
But it now seems that your grandma was truly an early adopter, who snapped up a set 5 years before regular television service began

Please tell me you're trying to be funny with your "gather around the radio" remark... % of homes with tv passed 50% somewhere around 1953-1954. Uncle Miltie? Jack Paar? The Honeymooners? Any of it sound familiar?

More fun tv facts

Please tell me you're trying to be funny with your "gather around the radio" remark... % of homes with tv passed 50% somewhere around 1953-1954. Uncle Miltie? Jack Paar? The Honeymooners? Any of it sound familiar?

More fun tv facts

No agreed-upon standards

You are right, 10 years ago there were no agreed upon standards. Now there are, which is why HDTV can now take off in the US.

no market

Just like there was no market for television when it first was released. The first TV broadcasts were of radio shows. Who the heck would want to pay $$$$ for a TV just to watch some guy speak into a microphone ?

Just like there was no market for color television when it was first released. Do you know how long it took for broadcasters to move from black and white to color ? Current belief is that the real number is closer to 1,000 sets sold to the public. Thats how many color TV sets were sold where first released. See TV History

Japan and Germany have had it for a decade

They had analog, uncompressed HDTV. i.e. No MPEG-2.

From Evolution of Television Japanese HDTV takes 20 MHz of bandwidth to send pictures with over 675,000 pixels. In the United States, a standard ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) screen can have up to 1080 lines of 1920 pixels each, or 2,073,600 pixels per frame. (in 6Mhz of bandwidth)

Japan are moving towards digital HDTV. DVB now has provisions for HD transmissions.

If we look at HTML the FRAMESET/FRAME construct has become part of the HTML 4.0 specification in 1998. Officially both HTML 2.0 ('95) and HTML 3.2 ('97) did not support frames. I think however this has been done because both IE and Netscape did support frames for a while at that time.

It's obvious that similar concepts and implementations of what they patented have been done before...

Looks like the link is Slashdotted. You can check out more about it at this site:
http://www.tvhistory.tv/Smallest%20TV.htm

(Got it from the ebay add posted above)

Amusing, eh? The irony of it all.

TV remotes were originally designed to assist the viewer from having to watch commercials. Why else would someone feel the need to instantly change the channel if there were so few (ABC/CBS/NBC/?) in the 1940's/50's?

Zenith advertised this appeal, as seen on this site, but more specifically in this picture.

It seems logical that if entertainment companies are opposed to the 'skip-commercial' feature offered by any product, then they must be real pissed with the popularity of the TV remote seeing as how the consumer exerts some limited power through the remote.

Only thing that allowed the existence of remotes is that people were buying them and therefore supporting the manufacturers.

Imagine a world without TV remotes. The industry has to deal with it, and are currently trying to stop any more similar products which the consumer can enjoy.

You can even say that since the consumers of TV service already have the ability to skip commercials (specifically by instantly switching channels via remote) and the industry has adapted to this ability, then they should adapt to the technology once again.

To this end, the solution I've heard is to incorporate ads within the programs with product placement. It's done quite regularly in movies and doesn't have to be obvious (ie. "Wayne's World II" where they're sporting Pepsi stuff compared to "Blade Runner" with background Coca-Cola advertisement).

Amusing, eh? The irony of it all.

TV remotes were originally designed to assist the viewer from having to watch commercials. Why else would someone feel the need to instantly change the channel if there were so few (ABC/CBS/NBC/?) in the 1940's/50's?

Zenith advertised this appeal, as seen on this site, but more specifically in this picture.

It seems logical that if entertainment companies are opposed to the 'skip-commercial' feature offered by any product, then they must be real pissed with the popularity of the TV remote seeing as how the consumer exerts some limited power through the remote.

Only thing that allowed the existence of remotes is that people were buying them and therefore supporting the manufacturers.

Imagine a world without TV remotes. The industry has to deal with it, and are currently trying to stop any more similar products which the consumer can enjoy.

You can even say that since the consumers of TV service already have the ability to skip commercials (specifically by instantly switching channels via remote) and the industry has adapted to this ability, then they should adapt to the technology once again.

To this end, the solution I've heard is to incorporate ads within the programs with product placement. It's done quite regularly in movies and doesn't have to be obvious (ie. "Wayne's World II" where they're sporting Pepsi stuff compared to "Blade Runner" with background Coca-Cola advertisement).

"I'd be willing to bet my house that over 5% of households don't have VCRs, and they cost less than $100 and have been around for over 20 years."

Hand over the house keys, my friend.