Early Color Television | Hacker News Reader

Early Color Television

earlytelevision.org

39 pointsbrudgers6 comments

This is hilarious. In a meeting to decide whose proprietary color TV system to mandate for industry adoption, the FCC required each of the three competing companies to demonstrate their receivers in operation alongside their rivals, each playing the same video content of their own respective choice. RCA's system didn't work so well, so they cheated by planting an engineer in the audience who would remotely adjust the hue control as needed. FTA:

CBS produced a "Woman's Program" with an auburn haired hostess. Well, she had auburn hair on rehearsal day and as RCA would be staffing each of its receivers with a "hue control engineer" who would make constant (as required) adjustments to the receivers during the telecasts, notes were passed from the WNBW studio to the engineers as to what colors to expect and therefore indirectly how to adjust the hue controls.

But CBS pulled a fast one - on the day of the actual telecast, the same lady appeared with what George Brown described as, "a ghastly shade of pink hair." Naturally the RCA engineers at the receiving site thought their TV sets had gone whacko and immediately began twisting the hue control to compensate. When they somehow managed to turn ghastly pink hair into auburn, the lady had a green face. The FCC personnel watching this without knowledge of the subterfuge dismissed the entire RCA display as, "RCA is out of adjustment - again."

> 7) CBS was on record as NOT favoring the commercialization of TV at that time citing a list of reasons (to follow). Virtually every other firm in electronics was in favor of TV being authorized for commercial operation.

It's hard to even begin to imagine what things would be like if television hadn't been authorized for commercial use. The world would likely be vastly different though.

I'm quite interested in the subject matter here but jesus that was long-winded...

It was long-winded. However, the intersection of raw technology, consumer product manufacturing and distribution, show business, and government regulation makes for a complicated story.

I can't think of anything in the modern era as kludgy as mechanical sequential color TV systems making it into 'production'.

Recirculating ball steering?

In the world of color, remember ansi.sys ? That was about 40 years after NTSC. Imagine how well color TV would have worked if the color information had been sent by embedded escape codes.

In the over-the-air broadcasting world, there are all those sub-carriers riding on just about all the FM signals making background monkey-chatter for each other.

And before multiplexing by frequency came along, there were those center-tap methods of sending three signals on two lines, seven signals on four lines (did anyone ever get it to work for fifteen signals on eight lines)?

Another way to put it: this page not only needs some editorial cleanup, it deserves it.

I had no idea of the politics behind the old-school TV standards -- I'd always assumed that they emerged fully formed from an archaeo-MPEG organization of some sort, where a bunch of industry players cooperated and pooled their patents, and where the regulators got involved only at the rubber-stamp stage.

It was well worth the time needed to plow through the verbiage, but not everybody will give it the same chance I did, which is a bummer.

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