Remember When…

It’s 1978, I’m 9 years old and my father comes in the house with n announcment that he bought something for the family.  It’s rare that he ever does this so we are all excited to see what it may be.  A new refrigerator? A pool?  New bedroom furniture?

In comes two men with the largest television I had ever seen in my life.  It was the all new, state of the art, General Electric Widescreen 1000 Projection TV.  GE proudly marketed the set as “a super-size TV with a picture three times as big as a 25-inch diagonal console and the ‘chairside convenience’ of random access remote control.”  It was awesome and I conned every friend I could to come to my house to show it off.  We only got three channels and one UHF station, but what channels they were!

I mention this because my father just recently found the behemoth in the garage, hidden behind some boxes and threw it out.  I got curious about it and did a little research.

According to US Patent 4181918, the giant wood veneer cabinet housed a much smaller CRT display that employed “a vertical deflection reversing switch to invert and laterally reverse the image, and a three element lens within a light-proof projection chamber to re-invert, magnify and project the image onto a forward projection type reflective screen.”

In other words, the image from a regular old TV tube was flipped and back-projected onto a transparent screen. Nor was there anything wide screen about it, at least not in the modern sense.

In addition to the honking huge screen and fancy remote, the set featured GE’s futuristic VIR automatic color control system, which used “computer-like circuitry” to decode hue and tint information encoded in the broadcast signal, preventing me from cranking the color controls in an attempt to burn out the cat’s eyeballs during Saturday morning cartoons (Yes, back then we could only watch cartoons on Saturdays).

Back then all this fancy technology was something to brag about.  Now, it’s simply junk to be placed on the curb for the trash man.  How long before our flat screens and high powered computers become something you look at and think “wow, how could anyone use such a thing?” While looking up the salvaging value on our implanted brain computer.