OT: Color TV Celebrates 50 Years

Those of us (and I believe that is the majority of us) who are old enough to remember the appearance of color television broadcasts into our lives can perhaps appreciate the quantum jump of technology of that era - or perhaps not?

I can recall in the early '60s we'd go out to eat on base (we were a military family) at the O Club on Sunday evenings. They had one of those old round tube color sets and we'd get to watch a few minutes of Disney. The picture quality was pretty horrible but it definitely was in color.

We didn't get a color set in our house until around '67 when the old man finally broke down and brought home a Magnavox 27" unit. I was in high school by that time. The first program we watched on it was Mission Impossible. Star Trek was a whole different experience in color. This set had decent color but still not all shows were broadcast in color. All those years we kids watched the Wizard of Oz on a B/W set? We never knew what we were missing, did we?

The stats say it wasn't until 1973 that color sets finally outsold black and white. Strange that it would take nearly 50 years for the next quantum jump (analog to digital & HDTV - which I won't have for still many more years) to hit the market.

They Have color TV now? Really?

Remember that show "UFO" from the 70s? I had no idea the women on Moonbase had purple hair until a few years ago when someone loaned me some episodes on videotape..

Oh Man, UFO was pretty cool!! I watched that as a kid, that and Space 1999. One of my favorite toys was a die cast Interceptor.

My Dad worked for RCA Astro at that time, so we got a color TV pretty quick. I was born too late for most of the shows to be B&W, except all the awful old science fiction movies (like the one with the giant ants, etc) that my Dad loved to watch.

Oh yea! Gerry Anderson did a lot of neat work back then. "UFO" was pretty stylish for the time, unappreciated and forgotten today.

Steve,
You have just tripped a flood of memories.
In the early fifties when my dad was stationed oversees, we used
to go to the O Club one day a week to see "I Love Lucy" movies. The
base did not have a T.V. station and the movie reruns of the stateside
shows was the closest we ever got.
The Base Exchange did have a hobby area which carried those
wooden scale models with packets of powdered glue, however. AHC would
ship to APO and FPO addresses to keep us supplied.
When we got back to the states, we kids went nuts being able to
watch the one station which served Roswell, New Mexico, from high
atop Comanche Hill. Even the commercials were of interest to us at that time.

>Steve,
>You have just tripped a flood of memories.
>In the early fifties when my dad was stationed
>oversees, we used to go to the O Club one day a week
>to see "I Love Lucy" movies. The base did not have a
>T.V. station and the movie reruns of the stateside
>shows was the closest we ever got.

Oh man... Don't get me started on AFRTS! When we were shipped over to the Philippines in the mid '60s they had AFRTS and a couple of civilian stations out of Manila. AFRTS (Armed Forces Radio and Television Service) didn't have any commericals. You'd watch a 30 minute sitcom and it would be over in 20 minutes. They'd have to fill the remaining 10 minute block with, whatever.

They also had REALLY old shows. Things like "Topper" and "The Gail Storm Show". We were rarely indoors enough to watch TV anyway. AFRTS didn't start broadcasting until around 2pm and they'd sign off at 11pm after playing John Gillespie Magee's "High Flight" and the Star Spangled Banner.

We got a color set while I was still in HS, but so few shows were in color that it didn't seem worth it, but it was cool!
Remember the "peacock" that always came on before the color shows on which ever network it was?
When I got married in '71, we bought a B/W set that we used for about 20 years.
Bill <><

Here's my recollection...constant readers here at good old SSW may know that I grew up in the Washington DC area, Va. side. Around 1952 or 1953, my family took me over to one of the buildings associated (I think) with the Smithsonian, which was only about 5 miles away. We stood in line a long time, maybe an hour, just to get a glimse of a working TV set. You looked at it for about a minute, and that was it, kind of like walking by a casket of some famous dude, lying in state.

The color really blew me away.

Another recollection: after seeing so many ho hum RCA sets in the '60s, my wife and I bought our first Sony Trinatron set in '72, just before the Japanese Winter Olympics in Sapphoro. The Japanese were providing the feed lines, essentially, to a Japanese set.

The resolution really blew me away. Big leap forward, and it has been nothing but Sonys from then on.

People today take all this for granted.

If you had a 10" B and W Philco behind a flat screen with no flutter rejection (every aircraft within 5 miles would screw up the picture), paid $250 for the privilege of maybe three stations, and you even would stare at test patterns, you wouldn't take it for granted.

"Glad we could get together", as a definitely b & w John Cameron Swayze would conclude his 15 minute news broadcasts each night. Sponsored bt Camels, by the way. And don't forget that 2 out of every 3 Doctors prefer Camels (although some have switched back to women).

Currell

Remember the old phosphers they used for color? You'd be watching a UCLA football game, and the light would keep reflecting and smearing off the gold helmet for a fraction of a second. Kind of like leaving your crayons out in the sun too long.

>We got a color set while I was still in HS, but so few shows
>were in color that it didn't seem worth it, but it was cool!
>Remember the "peacock" that always came on before the color
>shows on which ever network it was?
>When I got married in '71, we bought a B/W set that we used
>for about 20 years.
>Bill <><
>
>Just an Old Advanced flyer.

The Peacock was NBC. They were the first "all color network." They owned RCA, or RCA owned them. RCA was the originator of the color system that became the standard just as Zenith is the originator of the high definition system that is the new standard that broadcast is in the process of changing to. Fortunately the color wheel and a few other competing technologies never made it into play. The big problem in all this is not how to make it happen, but how to make it happen without making everything already in the system obsolete. The color portion of the signal had to be placed in the spectrum in such a way that the black and white signal could still be picked up by the black and white sets, and the color sets had to be made so that they would simply display a black and white signal when that was all that was being broadcast. The most interesting thing was to take the three colors that were broadcast (red, green and cyan when emitting light as on a picture tube; red, blue, and yellow when absorbing light as in print) and place the dots one on top of another and in the right intensity to produce the colors accurately. Convergence of the three light beams was a big problem back then. I started working as a bench man in a TV repair shop as a Junior in high school (1955) and we sold RCA TVs. I got in on the ground floor. My boss took a correspondence course in color TV and I did his homework for him so we both got the benefit (Well, I probably got a greater benefit than he did.) But back in those days you had to converge a new TV set when you took it out of the box. It took a couple of hours just to get the color set up right. Oh, and a 17 inch, round tube table model color TV cost $800. That was $800 in the 1950s. And the remote control was the wife. Inflation doesn't apply to everything.

One other interesting tidbit for those who weren't around then (or didn't have color then). We had the "egg and the chicken" routine at the time, just as we are starting with it all over again today. (How many of you have bought your wide screen high definition TV already?) The programmers were reluctant to do their shows in color when nobody had color sets yet at the time. And people were reluctant to buy color tvs (price notwithstanding) when there were few color shows being broadcast. At first it was mostly commercials. People with color TVs would watch the commercials because they were the only thing in color. There were a couple of specials now and then, but it took a while. Do you remember the first network show to be broadcast in color? "The Wonderful World of Disney", then on NBC.

Yep, we've come a long way.. Now we have 250 channels of junk, instead of 13.. Soon to be 500!

Any chance of a CL Stunt Channel in the future? (NOW we're talking!)

Believe it or not, we may have Bill Gates to thank (partially) for HDTV. Had it not been for the need to satisfy the requirements of the bloated Windows operating system, we'd surely not have 3.6 GHz CPUs, 1 GB fast RAMs, 200+ GB fast disks, and of course our super quality high resolution monitors (and video technology). So, in a not so indirect way, Microsoft has helped along our HDTV, by stimulating technology growth. (Some THEORY, huh?!)

I am so ancient that my memories of growing up in Tularosa, New Mexico from 1957 include having only ONE TV station (KROD, CBS) in El Paso for awhile. And it was quite "ghosty"!

OK, now we've brought up technology advances in television, how about a comparison of such in CL stunt over the same period? Wuhhh huhhh!
Whuhhhh!

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"It rubs the lotion on its skin,
it does this whenever it's told..
It rubs the lotion on its skin,
or else it gets the hose again.."
-Buffalo Bill, in Silence of the Lambs

Philo T. Farnsworth would be proud.

I remember watching "The Wizard of Oz" at least once a year the whole time I was growing up. It wasn't until I was in the military in the 70's that I found out that from the time Dorthy started down the yellow brick road, the rest of the movie was in color. I had thought the whole movie was in black and white, like I remembered watching it as a kid. It really blew me away when the color part started.

Hey Len: On that color wheel you mentioned...they actually would have to spin it with a motor, right?

Re the "Wizard": One of the first color shows that they showed over and over was "Peter Pan", starring Mary Martin.

During a given week, you might get a couple of hours of color programming. Kind of like what HDTV has already gone through.

>>OK, now we've brought up technology advances in television, how about a comparison of such in CL stunt over the same period? Wuhhh huhhh! Whuhhhh!

Larry,

More than once I have thought a life-time membership in the Flat Earth Society should be required for anyone participating in CL Stunt.

>>>OK, now we've brought up technology advances in television, how about a comparison of such in CL stunt over the same period? Wuhhh huhhh! Whuhhhh!
>
>Larry,
>
>More than once I have thought a life-time membership in the
>Flat Earth Society should be required for anyone
>participating in CL Stunt.
>
>Dan

You don't belong to the "Old Straight Track" club?

>And the remote control was the wife. Inflation doesn't apply to everything.

My uncle had a Philco B/W set with a clinker remote control. It had snap buttons when you slid down they'd clink some tuned chime and would control the TV. One day I was playing with a set of toy metal jacks. Every time I'd scoop them up the TV would change channels.

You guys don't have one of these?

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"My girlfriend and I went on a picnic. I don't know how she did it, but she got poison ivy on the brain. When it itched, the only way she could scratch it was to think about sandpaper." -Steven Wright

The comment on how far color TV has come in 50 years and what CL stunt has done over the same time span really wiped me out. My last CL plane was a Flight Streak with a ST .51 R/C engine and Roberts 3 line system in 1970. I used the plane to break in the engine. It balanced about 1 1/2 inches ahead of the LE!
I was wiped out when I saw the Ringmasters. Noblers, and Flight Streaks are still popular. Pictures of the VSC planes could have been taken in the 60`s. I guess they did it right back then!! My first color TV was a Heathkit 21 ". I bought it so that I could adjust and repair it myself. It got to be an obsession like tuning engines for CL! When solid state came along, I went with Sony and never looked back. Great memories...

Gary