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.
\n
\nThe 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/em>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n You could try to fix your TV yourself, but the manufacturers made them sufficiently scary that no one dared. You could be killed!<\/em> So you’d watch a TV with no sound, or a rolling picture or in all green . . . until the TV repairman showed up.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Yeah!<\/em><\/p>\n 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!<\/p>\n It’s an era that’s past, but not forgotten. Not really missed either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}