Our neighborhood blocked off the street for a Fourth of July picnic a few years ago. Sitting in a lawn chair talking to a long-retired neighbor over a beer, we got to talking about old analog TV standards. (We are both hams, so conversation tended to turn to radio-ish things.)
I remarked about how clever I thought it was mixing the video carrier and audio subcarrier to get the audio IF. And he says:
"Oh, it wasn't always like that. When I was a kid, there was a TV station in Philadelphia that transmitted 2 1/2 hours two nights a week. They taped up the schematics for a receiver inside a big picture window at their station, and we would all go down with notebooks and copy down the latest changes so that we could update our receivers. The audio subcarrier went through a lot of changes. AM, FM, and they moved the frequency around."
So... I realized that here was a guy who was watching television back when the way you got a TV receiver was to build it from scratch yourself. Wow number 1.
I said: "I suppose when the war came along you were sent to radar school like almost everybody else that worked on television?"
Answer: "No. Did you ever hear of Eckert and Mauchly?"
Me: stunned.