2 Mar
2012
2 Mar
'12
12:56 p.m.
William Donzelli wrote on Wed, 29 Feb 2012 01:43:16 -0500
I asked my father for more details and he confirmed what several here
guessed: he meant that they had lots of those old mechanical TV sets in
the RCA lab (Marion, Indiana) when he arrived there in 1957/58. So this
was in a kind of museum, not stuff that was being sold.
Ah, that makes a lot of sense
I
don't have examples, but to give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he
was referring to special cases such as projection TVs or some-or-other
studio equipment. Working in RCA he might have been seeing stuff most people
wouldn't.
I have a LOT of 1950s tech docs on RCA television equipment, and I
have never seen any hybrid mechanical systems mentioned in them.
When I tried to get him to explain how it would be possible to have a
mechanical vertical part and an electronic horizontal part we came to
the conclusion that the sets he was remembering were actually the fully
mechanical ones with the traditional spiral of holes from before World
War II.
There were single-axis CRTs made for speical purposes, there's one in
that Tektronix printer used with their storage-tube displays. Inm that
device the other axis is provbided by moving the paper pwas the end of
the CRT.
You could make a TV with such a CRT and a rotating mnirror drum to give
the other scan axis (prsumably the slower one). Whether this was ever
done I don't know, I've not heard of it but then vintage TV is nto my
speciality.
On a related subject, I have seen a few videos of modern recreations of
mechanical TVs on Youtube and feel they are a bit misleading. They are
being fed a signal created from a good video source, so the images we
see are far better than what you would get from a mechanical camera.
That is like showing off a SInclair ZX Spectrum hooked up to a SD card
and playing a video (you can see that on Youtube too) - it gives you a
wrong idea of what using the device was like when it was new.
Indeed. Which is why (to get this on-topic) I think it's important to
preserve as much of a vintage computer system as you can, not just the
processor.
By all means inteface a mdoern storage dervive to it for day-to-day use.
And hook up a mdoern printor or an interfave to a PC that grabs the data
intended to go to the pritner rather than running a clatterign mechanical
thing all the time. But keep the old cassette tape unit, the thermal
pritner tht fades if you looks at it wrong, the clattering ASR33, etc
jsut so you can rememebr (and demonstrate) what the system was really
like to use.
-tony