As that lady with the hick accent on TV says, in February of 2009 all broadcast television signals in the United States will go to digital. Your old analog television will no longer receive any signals not being broadcast. You can get a coupon from Uncle Fed to get a converter thingy for your old sets. But the whole situation got me thinking about television.
The oldest TV I own sits in my son’s room at his mother’s house. I bought it in 1986. It’s a Sony Trinitron, and it’s “portable” because it has handholds on the sides. But at 19″, it’s too bulky to take to the ball game.
That old Sony still works. It never failed. But televisions weren’t always that way. Once upon a time there was something called the television repairman.
Early TVs often went on the fritz. Unlike today’s television sets, early TV was analog through and through. Vacuum tubes powered the set, and they didn’t last forever. When a vacuum tube went, television went as well.
You could try to fix your TV yourself, but the manufacturers made them sufficiently scary that no one dared. You could be killed! So you’d watch a TV with no sound, or a rolling picture or in all green . . . until the TV repairman showed up.
The TV repairman was second only the pizza guy as the most popular non-relative to visit the house. He’d scootch the TV from its altar, unscrew the back, then dig in. A small mirror in front of the set allowed him to look at the picture as he worked his magic. A few minutes later and the TV Repairman was closing up.
Yeah!
Us kids would get as close to the set as we could, rejoining Gilligan and the Bradys like we hadn’t seen them in decades. The TV repairman would speak techno and explain the problem. Mom happily wrote him a check. And that TV picture? Well, it looked better than ever!
It’s an era that’s past, but not forgotten. Not really missed either.
I wonder if that isn’t a cultural change, rather than device specific. How many of your consumer electronics would you bother to get repaired? I wouldn’t open up my laptop (so long as it is under warranty), but other than that if some device goes whacky, I guess I’d try fixing it myself, exchange it for another device or just buy a new one. With the reliability of ICs and miniaturization, I guess it isn’t worth training people to fix hardware anymore. We might be wasteful, but atleast we are quick about it!!!
Comment by sriksrid — July 11, 2008 @ 11:27 am
Or a technological change. With ICs and printed circuit boards, who can really fix things? I remember taking my laser printer into a guy who tried to fix it with a logic probe. He was good, but he wasted a lot of my money taking time to find That One Chip that was broken. I ended up paying him $1,000 to fix something that would have cost me only $400 to send back to the shop (and probably replace the entire circuit board).
There is a TV Repair shop near my house. It’s never open. If it is, I plan on going inside and asking the guy if he actually still fixes TVs. If I think about it, I’ll snap a picture next time I’m by.
Comment by admin — July 11, 2008 @ 11:36 am
You Americans are lucky: the Australian Analouge Network was meant to be closed next year, but now it’s due to be closed in 2012 (not 2912 as I originally wrote!). We only get two commercial FTA stations where I live, and we have a PVR with our Pay TV that acts as our set top box. One of the channels (in Analouge) is prone to terrible interference, even on our second UHF antenna. Really annoying when we can’t watch a show on the PVR in digital.
We used to have a little 15″ Sony CRT down the shed (It too was a Trinitron), but we threw it out in The Great Purge of 2008. Our oldest TV is the one in our loungeroom: a 26″ Sony Trinitron Wega one (the Wega means it’s really flat. The trinitron ones had a slight curve to them. It’s a silly name). It’s about eight years old, and still works fine, although I doubt it will be a pretty sight when we have to replace it: CRT’s are going out of fashion, and a Plasma of the same size runs about $1500.
Comment by Douglas — July 11, 2008 @ 5:14 pm