Why the last major U.S. television set maker, Zenith, finally gave up (1988) | Hacker News Reader

Why the last major U.S. television set maker, Zenith, finally gave up (1988)

spectrum.ieee.org

51 pointsrbanffy35 comments

It took some close reading of the article to determine that this account is from 1988. I'd thought Zenith had long since ... met its nadir.

As it turns out, the company still exists, somewhat, as a subsidiary of Korean-based LG Electronics, according to Wikipedia:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenith_Electronics>

> It took some close reading of the article to determine that this account is from 1988. I'd thought Zenith had long since ... met its nadir.

Your mental ad-blocker may have caused you to ignore the box that explained that:

> This article was first published as “The longest survivor loses its grip.” It appeared in the August 1988 issue of IEEE Spectrum. A PDF version is available on IEEE Xplore. The photographs appeared in the original print version.

The box uses small type and isn't prominently placed. It is of course what I ultimately did stumble on.

I'd searched the top, bottom, and sidebars (usual places) for a dateline without luck. There is a notation presently reading "23 h" (I presume "23 hours ago) at the top of the article. This is of course misleading.

There's no other prominent notice that the piece is historical, and very little context within the text itself placing dates, though the notion that CRT masks would be a current (2022) technological development struck me as unlikely. IEEE should do better.

Hiding datelines, amongst other sins (relative times, e.g., X time-units ago, or JS-dependent datelines), are an increasingly common Web annoyance.

Contrast The Guardian who rather refreshingly note prominently when a piece is no longer current. E.g., <https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/apr/04/offshore-secrets-...>, which notes in a bold black-on-yellow box at the top of the page "This article is more than 9 years old". (From an earlier comment of mine.)

That box only appears after you tap the "read more" button that is styled as plain text, at least when viewed in mobile Safari. It's an odd pair of decisions made by the folks at IEEE.

Even weirder, a few years ago Dell was selling Zenith co-branded thin clients.

“Dell Wyse Zenith Zero COOX Thin Client”

https://www.ebay.com/itm/162817003918?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid...

That's a double zombie. Wyse mainframe terminals were popular in the 80's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Wyse#History

My first IBM compatible was an AT class WYSE with passive main board.

It was a decommissioned CAD machine so it has that high resolution Hercules monochrome display.

The WY-50 and similar models were also popular for Unix systems and microcomputers.

The screen looked great, IIRC they could do smooth scroll, and they were overall kinda stylish. (Though today in a vintage terminal I'd prefer the command set to be ANSI X3.64 or VT-102. Not Wyse, nor Televideo, nor something else.)

IIRC, some of the WYSE terminals can do Tektronix graphics. AFAIK only DEC ones do ReGIS. Also, oddly enough, the last two generations of DEC serial terminals (the VT 400 and 500 series) dropped graphics support (they kept the 300 line in production for that).

These machines should be extremely inexpensive to make (an 8-bit microcontroller, 68xx or 8032 and barely enough memory to back the display) back then and the high prices they commanded (and that ended up killing them) were very hard to justify in comparison with a PC.

I miss these machines. Smooth scrolling (speed adjusted to keep up with the backlog) should be a thing in modern terminal windows.

Thanks, I didn't know that about Tek graphics in Wyse, nor about DEC dropping ReGIS. (I once tried shopping for an original Tek terminal, to play with the graphics, but prohibitively expensive, and also large.)

One attraction of the later DEC terminals is that they can take a PS/2 keyboard, which are somewhat easier to find in good condition, and in compact versions, than the original DEC parts.

> they can take a PS/2 keyboard

The bright side is that their fonts are somewhat nicer. IIRC, a VT330 has 240 scanlines (even though ReGIS pretends it's 480)

Right. Also Unix serial terminals.

There was a brief hint of a resurgence in the late 1990s with "thin-client" craze.

We've got thin clients now, but they're phat, made by Apple and Samsung mostly, and fit in your pocket. For increasingly large values of pocket.

> but they're phat, made by Apple and Samsung mostly, and fit in your pocket.

Also Chromebooks and those Windows laptops that can't do much more than running Chrome (and swapping to eMMC).

Reminds me of RISC vs. CISC. Who won? Yes.

Thin client or thick client? Yes.

This is just some weird keyword spam the seller has added. I have one of those and there is no Xenith, Zenith, Zero or COOX branding on them, Just Wyse. I ran it as a light ssh server with an external USB disk for extra storage. Upgraded the internal 44pin ATA flash disk to 8GB and it ran Debian.

It seems that it's Dell Wyse Xenith, Google corrected me.

I similarly found myself irritated that there was no mention of Zenith's prominent place in the advent of the ATSC digital television system and their subsequent role as technical shepherds of ATSC hardware and software development, which went with all the rest over to LG. My bad for not noticing the 1988 timeframe of the article.

Growing up in the early-80's, my parents were diehard Zenith customers. "They make the best TVs" was something I heard often from them. I was just a young boy, but a few things stand out in retrospect:

1) Zenith was likely a very popular brand in their Boomer households in the 50's and 60's.

2) This was an age when there were still "Television Repair Stores" where you would take your TV when it failed for some reason. These probably leaned towards US-built brands.

3) There was probably not a small amount of "Made in the U.S.A." boosterism by my parents going on. The 80's was a decade when "fear of Japan taking over everything" was very common.

Point 2 is interesting, because one of the reason that foreign-manufactured TVs came to prominence is because they were cheap enough + reliable enough that TVs could functionally be a disposable good. Another is that right during the late 80s/early 90s is when TVs started showing substantial improvements every ~5 years, whereas things were more static in the early 80s and before, which meant that instead of repairing an old TV, you could buy a new one that was substantially better than your old one.

Basically the TV market turned from being similar to the car market to the computer market.

Interestingly, I think we may be heading back in some ways, as the improvements/"upgrades" on TVs are slowing down, and there's also a growing anti-waste movement + a squeezed poor/lower class. I wouldn't be surprised if TV repair makes a comeback.

(My grandfather repaired TVs.)

Old TV's had consumable, user-replacible components (the tubes), and were unreliable due to being hand wired.

I don't see the industry moving back to either of those things.

These days, the repairable parts are likely to out last the display anyway. I don't see TV repair becoming common again. I could imagine them encouraging recycling (and local shopping) by adding a "core" fee like they do for lead acid batteries.

Their replacements were far less reliable because the ICs were socketed, not soldered onto the board. My old man regularly opened the back of his 1980 RCA to “crack knuckles”…firmly seat ICs that had lifted up from the DIP sockets.

The unreliable nature of tube NTSC color TVs was entirely the fault of tubes being pushed to their limits and the need for 600 volt plate supplies.

I thought that there was some definite economization-to-death in the later years.

From like 1995 until their demise, was there any meaningful enhancement to NTSC tube TVs? There were minor enhancements in on-screen display, flatter glass fronts, and maybe the addition of S-video inputs, but there wasn't really much that could be leveraged as a "premium" set that could demand a higher margin except for maybe a Sony Trinitron. There was no meaningful "Replace your 720-line set with a 1080- or 2160-line one" sales pitch. The obvious way to compete is to go full Madman Muntz and cut every possible corner.

I recall in the early 2000s a fairly newish (at the time) RCA 27" tube release the magic smoke, and the discussion on sci.electronics.repair was very much "oh, that chassis design is all but guaranteed to fail catastropically when it does fail, may as well buy a new set". I don't doubt that group had several thousand man-years of repair experience, and they had very little positive to say for any set made after the Carter administration.

Yeah, inside the enclosure of a modern TV is an LCD panel connected to a board the size of a raspberry pi that holds a SOC and some input connectors. There just isn't anything to be repaired. The minimum unit of replacement is the entire unit.

Hmm, my family once replaced our LG 1080p TV's mainboard after the HDMI ports failed, then the TV stopped powering on past the splash screen at all. The built-in content apps (the early days of smart TVs before they turned into a surveillance capitalism hellscape) are dead, and 1080p non-HDR is obsolete for pixel-peepers, but for our limited use, the screen still works just fine.

It kind of depends on the failure modes. There was a wave of Samsung TVs which were a big victim of bad capacitors at the time. Replacing <$1 worth of caps would often salvage the TV.

Also, a number of TVs these days fail because of poor phosphor coatings on the light strips causing color issues and uneven brightness. The stuff literally starts falling apart inside the TV. A quick clean and replacement light arrays ( often <$75) will then refresh the TV, making it like new again for at least several more years. Hopefully the replacement light arrays will last longer.

Sometimes the power supply, core logic, and inputs will be on separate boards. This means if an input connector gets physically broken it may be possible to replace just the board for the inputs instead of having to replace the entire board. Even then, assuming you can find it the board itself can be significantly cheaper than the entire TV. YMMV on parts availability though.

I can see the mainboard being replaceable. The SoC's become slow after a few years on smart TV's and makes using them a pain because of how sluggish and unresponsive the UI becomes

That's wishful thinking though, I don't see this happening.

You'd think TV repair was dead, but we have a local TV repair guy who has a few lucrative warranty repair contracts with some of the bigger brand names.

He usually doesn't do much other than replace fried main boards, but occasionally will do a proper repair (where possible) on out of warranty TVs. That work I can't see how he makes money out of it, but he does it anyway.

I'm glad he is still going, he is a dab hand at fixing vintage hi-fi which is subsidised by his TV warranty work.

What changed is that TVs are no longer primarily being used to watch broadcast television.

Nowadays a television is used to watch Netflix and to play videogames on.

You'd imagine this would drive a resurgence in "dumb" monitors, but no, monitoring viewing using fingerprinting is too valuable.

It's not that TVs are so cheap that they are disposable, but rather that repairs are so expensive that you might as well just replace the whole thing. Even when all you'd need are some inexpensive parts the cost of parts + service just to get am extra year or two out of a TV before something else fails (as they are designed to do) is less attractive than just replacing the device.

> The 80's was a decade when "fear of Japan taking over everything" was very common.

What an outdated, parochial view of the world.

Everyone knows China's taking over everything.

And in the '40s, it'll be "India's taking over everything". And in the '60s, "Nigeria's taking over everything".

Demographics is the least cloudy crystal ball.

Zenith TVs were pretty great but I don't recall any Made in America-ism around them. The only comparable/better TVs were Sony Trinitrons and they were more expensive.

I owned some of both. The last TV repair store in Manhattan (NYC) closed up around 2007. It was on 14th St around 1st or Ave A on the south side of the street. I'd had a beloved Zenith TV repaired there just a few years prior.

There's still a guy in California who repairs the broadcast monitor versions of Sony Trinitrons, which were still in pr. He's retired, but has a bunch of parts and still repairs these monitors (mostly for gamers) to keep busy. Sony stopped producting those tubes in 2004.

Interestingly, Sony's Trinitron equipment ended up getting sold to a company in India that's recycling CRTs. I believe they also tried making new ones but it turns out making quality tubes is practically an artform and requires deep skill that nobody left working has.

"harmed rather than helped by a decade of economizing cutbacks in research and development"

I always felt that companies what did this were playing a losing game. But since so many of them did play it, there must be payout.

I still have a zenith TV, I was told it's over 30 years old, and it runs just fine. Was used as a constant video monitor for 10 years prior. This thing might outlive me.

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