Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.
– Grace Hopper
Before solid-state electronics, like the transistor, there were vacuum tube electronics like the triode. Vacuum tubes consume a lot of power and are fragile, similar to an incandescent light bulb.
As a child, we had many televisions in my home. Every bedroom had one, and there were two more in the basement. The reason we had so many TVs was because my father would always stop to pick up discarded televisions that were lying on the side of the road, waiting for track pickup.
About a mile from home was the now defunct Blair TV repair shop that had tube tester. My father would pull out any suspected bad tubes from the TV's he found and bring the tubes to the TV repair shop for testing. Once he uncovered a bad tube, he'd pay a few bucks to replace it and, voila, we'd have a working TV in the house.
No comments:
Post a Comment