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Television is 100 years old today

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Re: Television is 100 years old today

#231

Post by account42 »

sodafountan wrote: post #68
jibolash wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately technological progress is not always exponential. An human landed on the moon 56 years ago and people back then thought space travel would be a routine thing today so it'll be interesting to see how things go

It's certainly not routine, but I'd say the privatization of the space industry that's unfolded over the last few decades is significant progress. When I get depressed and look out at the world, I'm actually amazed at what I'm living through—the internet, space travel, electric and autonomous cars, smartphones. It's really amazing.

"Progress" towards what? The average dystopian sci-fi story where the galaxy is ruled by mega-corporations?

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#232

Post by account42 »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #165
josalhor wrote: post #53

On the one hand I look at some tech lifecycles and feel everything moves so slow (cars, energy and train infrastructure etc..). And then I look at other stuff and I cannot phantom that someone who was born 100 years ago saw a TV (or media electronic screen) from conception to modern miracle. As someone in his 20s I can't imagine what I'll see in the next 80 years!

> As someone in his 20s I can't imagine what I'll see in the next 80 years! All of these rapid technological advancements are a function of tremendous increases in energy available . We passed peak conventional oil years ago and only see proven reserves increase because we redefined 'shale oil' as included under proven reserves. But shale oil has much lower EROEI than traditional oil. We can already see geopolitics h…

I don't think we'll see a decline in technology globally but there will definitely be some regressions in countries that put feel good politics over the energy needs of their citizens.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#233

Post by account42 »

cf100clunk wrote: post #109
tosti wrote: post #3

High definition is nearly 90 years old? I guess their definition of high is quite low by more modern standards.

Analogue interlaced-scan TV systems like PAL and SECAM were actually ''higher'' definition in relation to NTSC by visual line count, although the former's 25Hz refresh rate was noticeable for flickering compared to NTSC's ~30Hz, which was much closer to the human eye's comfort level. There was a prototype 819-line analogue ''high definition'' system used to record The T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, with excellent results, bu…

> Analogue interlaced-scan TV systems like PAL and SECAM were actually ''higher'' definition in relation to NTSC by visual line count, although the former's 25Hz refresh rate was noticeable for flickering compared to NTSC's ~30Hz, which was much closer to the human eye's comfort level.

Yet motion pictures are still stuck at 24 FPS to this day and there are even people who have strong opinions about this being a good thing.

Also just because NTSC was 29.97 Hz doesn't mean that the video content actually was - almost everything shot on film was actually effectively 23.97 Hz - telecined to 59.94 fields per second but that doesn't actually change the number of unique full frames.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#234

Post by account42 »

nephihaha wrote: post #112
banku_brougham wrote: post #95

for every episode of the A-Team, for Saturday morning cartoons, for I Love Lucy, and for Miami Vice, I give thanks. Edit: And Star Trek, and Cosmos

Diamonds on a dung heap. For every good series which we love there are dozens of terrible/forgettable ones. A shame since TV has so much potential as a medium.

Terrible shows are still better than actively malicious ones.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#235

Post by account42 »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #144
nephihaha wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diamonds on a dung heap. For every good series which we love there are dozens of terrible/forgettable ones. A shame since TV has so much potential as a medium.

I think this is likely to be true for every artistic creation that requires lots of capital and widespread human coordination. Ultimately for a TV show to be great many, many things have to go right, and much of what could go wrong happens after the money is spent and the air date is already assured. I'm grateful we've had so many great things, certainly far more than I'll have time to watch in my life. But I'm not a…

TV has a fairly bad record of keeping shows that are already shown to be good alive though because good does not equate profitable for the network or individual decision makers (which are again no the same thing).

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#236

Post by account42 »

nephihaha wrote: post #220
HelloMcFly wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is likely to be true for every artistic creation that requires lots of capital and widespread human coordination. Ultimately for a TV show to be great many, many things have to go right, and much of what could go wrong happens after the money is spent and the air date is already assured. I'm grateful we've had so many great things, certainly far more than I'll have time to watch in my life. But I'm not a…

I think the problem nowadays is that there are so many channels and so much space to fill. TV runs 24/7 now on hundreds of channels. In many cases, it isn't worth the while of a small channel to make an expensive programme as they would lose money. Sometimes, the "wrong" programme is the hit. I know the History Channel started off with serious documentaries (some of them excellent quality) which not enough people wat…

How many people even watch TV "channels" these days? Seems most people have moved to a la carte streaming services. I don't really like either myself and prefer local copies of films but seem to be in a very small minority there.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#237

Post by adrian_b »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #167
retrac wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a synchronous and instantaneous nature you don't find in modern designs. The image is not stored at any point. The receiver and the transmitter are part of the same electric circuit in a certain sense. It's a virtual circuit but the entire thing - transmitter and receiving unit alike - are oscillating in unison driven by a single clock. The image is never entirely realized as a complete thing, either. While s…

>>> The image is not stored at any point. The very first computers (Manchester baby) used CRTs as memory - the ones and zeros were bright spots on a “mesh” and the electric charge on the mesh was read and resent back to the crt to keep the ram fresh (a sorta self refreshing ram)

Yes, but those were not the standard kind of CRTs that are used in TV sets and monitors.

The CRTs with memory for early computers were actually derived from the special CRTs used in video cameras. There the image formed by the projected light was converted in a distribution of charge stored on an electrode, which was then sensed by scanning with an electron beam.

Using CRTs as memory has been proposed by von Neumann and in his proposal he used the appropriate name for that kind of CRT: "iconoscope".

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#238

Post by adrian_b »

hahahahhaah wrote: post #190
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> The image is not stored at any point. The very first computers (Manchester baby) used CRTs as memory - the ones and zeros were bright spots on a “mesh” and the electric charge on the mesh was read and resent back to the crt to keep the ram fresh (a sorta self refreshing ram)

Why didn't that catch on pre-transistor? Feels like you'd get higher density than valves and relays.

DRAM memories made with special CRTs with memory have been used for a few years, until 1954. For instance the first generation of commercial electronic computers made by IBM (scientific IBM 701 and business-oriented IBM 702) have used such CRTs.

Then the CRT memories have become obsolete almost instantaneously, due to the development of magnetic core memories, which did not require periodic refreshing and which were significantly faster. The fact that they were also non-volatile was convenient at that early time, though not essential.

Today, due to security concerns, you would actually not want for your main memory to be non-volatile, unless you also always encrypt it completely, which creates problems of secret key management.

So CRT memories have become obsolete several years before the replacement of vacuum tubes in computers with transistors, which happened around 1959/1960.

Besides CRT memories and delay line memories, another kind of early computer memory that has quickly become obsolete was the memory with magnetic drums.

In the cheapest early computers (like IBM 650), the main memory was not a RAM (i.e. neither a CRT nor with magnetic cores), but a magnetic drum memory (i.e. with sequential periodic access to data).

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#239

Post by account42 »

Edman274 wrote: post #77
morkalork wrote: post #17

Long live the new flesh

It did always strike me as funny that Cronenberg had a movie about "what if TV was evil and made people murderous and the studio execs had to pay", and a movie about "what if video games were evil and made people murderous and their creators had to pay", but never a movie about "what if movies were evil and made people murderous and film directors had to pay". Obvious bias aside I wonder if it would work as a story -…

The game one being eXistenZ? Only recently got to see Videodrome and quite liked it so will check it out.

Re: Television is 100 years old today

#240

Post by accounting2026 »

sosomoxie wrote: post #64

CRTs are peak steam punk technology. Analog, electric, kinda dangerous. Just totally mindblowing that we had these things in our living rooms shooting electric beams everywhere. I doubt it's environmentally friendly at all, but I'd love to see some new CRTs being made.

Yes - and x-rays too! Both from the main TV tube itself (though often shielded) but historically the main problem was actually the vacuum rectifiers used to generate the high voltages required. Those vacuum tubes essentially became x-ray bulbs and had to be shielded. This problem appeared as the first color TV's appeared in the late 60s. Color required higher voltages for the same brightness, due to the introduction of a mask that absorbed a lot of the energy. As a famous example, certain GE TV's would emit a strong beam of x-rays, but it was downwards so it would mostly expose someone beneath the TV. Reportedly a few models could emit 50,000 mR/hr at 9 inches distance https://www.nytimes.com/1967/07/22/archives/owners-of-9000-c... which is actually quite a lot (enough for radiation sickness after a few hours). All were recalled of course!
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