7 Jul 2023 5:04 pm
Xavier_Onassis » 07 Jul 2023, 10:30 am » wrote: ↑ When was that? I bet you cannot even give any date here.
First, TV sets had tubes. Then the tubes were replaced by modular circuit boards with transistors on them.
Tune sets were notoriously unreliable: one loose tube and the sound vanished or the picture was unwatchable.
And they were very expensive. The first B&W set my father bought in 1953 cost $450, over half a month's salary, and it died spectacularly the night that the Andrea Doria collided with the Stockholm in NY harbor in 1956. It smoked, then there was a bright flash then a small ball of electricity rose out of the back of the set and went <*pop!*>. It had a 14 inch screen and one small speaker.
It turns out that some people were better and faster at working with assembling circuit boards, notably people with smaller fingers who were skilled at using chopsticks, such as Japanese, Korean, and Chinese women.
There are still TV sets made in the USA, though most are assembled in Asia. You can google TV sets made in USA.
I have an old style 36" JVC that has outlasted three remotes and four converter boxes and was made in Mexico in 1990. I bought it, with a table for it to sit on, for $125 in a garage sale in 1996. I have not replaced it because the picture is still great and it is very heavy and hard to move I took me and a friend three hours to get it out of the car and into where it sits today.
The doria collision wasn't in the harbor I remember my grandfather working at motorolla...they madetv's. I also remember the tube sts well.
My father used to pull the tuner apart and clean it. When the set stopped working he popped the tube out. The drug store had a tube tester and a whole aisle of tubes. Most of the problems were reception if you depended on the "rabbit ears".
My parents didn't get their first color set until I was in high-school. My first few sets were black and white. They were less expensive and the picture was sharper.