Television is 100 years old today

SpaceEx has made a ton of progress in space travel, granted it's not an ideal situation with it being a mega corp, but it moved a hell of a lot faster than NASA could have.

Perhaps someday we'll have individualized space flight like we have ownership over our cars and private planes.

Don't know what you're getting at by saying the galaxy will be ruled by mega-corps. Seems pretty democratic so far, and most of the things achieved couldn't have been without organization.

> And while it is not quantized as such there is an element of semi-digital protocol to it.

Yes, before posting I did debate that exact point in my head, with scanlines as the clearest example :-). However, I decided the point is still directionally valid because ultimately most timing-centric analog signal encoding has some aspect of being quantized, if only to thresholds. Technically it would be more correct to narrow my statement about "never quantized" to the analog waveform driving the electron gun as it sweeps horizontally across a line. It always amazes digital-centric engineers weaned on pixels when they realize the timing of the electron gun sweep in every viewer's analog TV was literally created by the crystal driving the sweep of the 'master' camera in the TV studio (and would drift in phase with that crystal as it warmed up!). It's the inevitable consequence of there being no practical way to store or buffer such a high frequency signal for re-timing. Every component in the chain from the cameras to switchers to transmitters to TVs had to lock to the master clock. Live TV in those days was truly "live" to within 63.5 microseconds of photons hitting vacuum tubes in the camera (plus the time time it took for the electrons to move from here to there). Today, "live" HDTV signals are so digitally buffered, re-timed and re-encoded at every step on their way to us, we're lucky if they're within 20 seconds of photons striking imagers.

My larger point though was that in the 1930s even that strict signal timing had to be encoded and decoded purely with discrete analog components. I have a 1950s Predicta television and looking at the components on the boards one can't help wondering "how the hell did they come up with this crazy scheme." Driving home just how bonkers the whole idea of analog composite television was for the time.

> first, how do you fit in the color so a monochrome TV can still show it?

To clarify for anyone who may not know, analog television was created in the 1930s as a black-and-white composite standard defined by the EIA in the RS-170 specification, then in 1953 color was added by a very clever hack which kept all broadcasts backward compatible with existing B&W TVs (defined in the RS-170A specification). Politicians mandated this because they feared nerfing all the B&W TVs owned by voters. But that hack came with some significant technical compromises which complicated and degraded color analog video for over 50 years.

Yes knew what you meant, and fully agree. It is fascinating TV is even possible just out of all these rather simple and bulky analog components. Even the first color TV's were with vacuum tubes and no transitors.

As I recall there's all kinds of hacks in the design to keep them cheap. For instance, letting the fly-back transformer for producing the high voltages needed operate at the same frequency as the horizontal scan rate (~15 kHz) so that mechanism essentially serves double duty. The same was even seen in microcomputers where the same crystal needed for TV was also used for the microprocessor - meaning that e.g. a "European" Commodore 64 with PAL was actually a few percent slower than an American C64 with NTSC. And other crazy things like that.

I don't know. Steam and electricity seem more like a coincidence that they were developed at the same time, so worlds without one seem natural. Another possibility might be no semiconductors. No nuclear also feels plausible, but it's just not interesting. Anything else requires a massive stretch to explain why technology got stuck in such a state.

Perhaps, if you are worried about realism from the perspective of modern technology. But a lot of the concept of retrofuturism is considering the possible futures from the perspectives of the past. You don't necessarily need realism for why you would consider an exercise like that.

Steampunk is "rootable" in the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and others. We have scifi visions from Victorian and Edwardian lenses. It wasn't needed at the time to explain how you steam power a submarine or a rocket ship, it was just extrapolating "if this goes on" of quick advances in steam power and expecting them to eventually get there.

Similar with a lot of Diselpunk. The 1930s through the 1950s are often referred to as the Golden Age of scifi. There's so much science fiction written in the real world with a zeal for possible futures that never happened. We don't necessarily need a "massive stretch" to explain why technology took a different path or "got stuck" at a particular point. We've plenty of ideas of the exuberance of that era just in the books that they wrote and published themselves.

(Not that we are lacking in literary means to create excuses for the "realism" of retrofuture, either, when we care to. For one obvious instance, the Fallout franchise's nuclear warfare is central to its dieselpunk setting and an obvious reason for technology to get "stuck". For one less obvious reason, I like "For All Mankind" and its "Apollopunk" setting using the excuse of Russia beating the United States to first boots on the Moon and the butterfly impacts that could have had.)