The image is not stored at any point. The receiver and the transmitter are part of the same electric circuit in a certain sense. It's a virtual circuit but the entire thing - transmitter and receiving unit alike - are oscillating in unison driven by a single clock.
The image is never entirely realized as a complete thing, either. While slow phosphor tubes do display a static image, most CRT systems used extremely fast phosphors; they release the majority of the light within a millisecond of the beam hitting them. If you take a really fast exposure of a CRT display (say 1/100,000th of a second) you don't see the whole image on the photograph - only the most recently few drawn lines glow. The image as a whole never exists at the same time. It exists only in the persistence of vision.
Just wanted to add one thing, not as a correction but just because I learned it recently and find it fascinating. PAL televisions (the color TV standard in Europe) actually do store one full horizontal scanline at a time, before any of it is drawn on the screen. This is due to a clever encoding used in this format where the TV actually needs to average two successive scan lines (phase-shifted compared to each other) to draw them. Supposedly this cancels out some forms of distortion. It is quite fascinating this was even possible with analogue technology. The line is stored in a delay line for 64 microseconds. See e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsk4WWtRx6M
In fact in order to show a feed of only text/logos/etc in the earlier days, they would literally just point the camera at a physical object (like letters on a paper, etc) and broadcast from the camera directly. There wasn’t really any other way to do it.
The very first computers (Manchester baby) used CRTs as memory - the ones and zeros were bright spots on a “mesh” and the electric charge on the mesh was read and resent back to the crt to keep the ram fresh (a sorta self refreshing ram)
Being old enough to have learned video engineering at the end of the analog days, it's kind of fun helping young engineers today wrap their brains around completely alien concepts, like "the image is never pixels" then "it's never digital" and "never quantized." Those who've been raised in a digital world learn to understand things from a fundamentally digital frame of reference. Even analog signals are often reasoned about as if their quantized form was their "true nature".
Interestingly, I suspect the converse would be equally true trying to explain digital television to a 1930s video engineer. They'd probably struggle similarly, always mentally remapping digital images to their "true" analog nature. The fundamental nature of their world was analog. Nothing was quantized. Even the idea "quanta" might be at the root of physics was newfangled, suspect and, even if true, of no practical use in engineering systems.
:-))))
This sounds like a brute force solution over just having the display controller read the image as it is being sent and emulating the phosphors.
Sometimes people use "Steampunk" for shorthand for both because there are some overlaps in either direction, especially if you are trying for "just" pre-WWI retrofuture. Though I think the above poster was maybe especially trying to highlight the sort of pre-WWI overlap with Steampunk with more electricity but not yet as many cars and "diesel".
How this is even possible that I remember all this, because I was 4 yrs old?
Gemini knows:
The Film: In the Days of the Spartakiad (1956/1957)
The song "Moscow Nights" was originally written for a documentary film called "In the Days of the Spartakiad" (V dni spartakiady), which chronicled a massive Soviet sports competition.
The Scene: In the film, there is a romantic, quiet scene where athletes are resting in the countryside near Moscow at night.
The Music: The song was sung by Vladimir Troshin. It was intended to be background music, but it was so hauntingly melodic that it became an overnight sensation across the USSR and its neighbors.
The Finnish Connection: In 1957, the song became a massive hit in Finland and Estonia. Since you were watching Estonian TV, you likely saw a version where the dialogue or narration was dubbed into Finnish—a common practice for broadcasts intended for Finnish-speaking audiences across the Gulf of Finland.
Philo Farnsworth demonstrated a competing technology a few years later, but every TV today is based on his technology.
So, who actually invented Television?
David Sarnoff and RCA was an entirely different matter, of course…
What happened?
The TV I have now in my living room is closer to a computer than a television from when I grew up (born 1975) anyway, so the word could mean all sorts of things. I mean, we still call our pocket computers "phones" even though they are mainly used for viewing cats at a distance.
Sure enough, this was the system selected as the winner by the U.S. standard-setting body at the time. Needless to say, it failed and was replaced by what we ended up with... which still sucked because of the horrible decision to go to a non-integer frame rate. Incredibly, we are for some reason still plagued by 29.97 FPS long after the analog system that required it was shut off.
When the UK (and Europe) went colour it changed to a whole new system and didn't have to worry too much about backward compatibility. It had a higher bandwidth (8mhz - so 33% more than NTSC), and was broadcasting on new channels separate to the original 405 lines. It also had features like alternating the phase of every other line to reduce the "tint" or "never twice the same color" problem that NTSC had
America chose 30fps but then had to slow it by 1/1001ths to avoid interference.
Of course because by the 90s and the growth of digital, there was already far too much stuff expecting "29.97"hz so it remained, again for backward compatibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation#Sup...
In the United States in 1935, the Radio Corporation of America demonstrated a 343-line television system. In 1936, two committees of the Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), which is now known as the Consumer Electronics Association, proposed that U.S. television channels be standardized at a bandwidth of 6 MHz, and recommended a 441-line, interlaced, 30 frame-per-second television system. The RF modulation system proposed in this recommendation used double-sideband, amplitude-modulated transmission, limiting the video bandwidth it was capable of carrying to 2.5 MHz. In 1938, this RMA proposal was amended to employ vestigial-sideband (VSB) transmission instead of double sideband. In the vestigial-sideband approach, only the upper sidebands-those above the carrier frequency-plus a small segment or vestige of the lower sidebands, are transmitted. VSB raised the transmitted video bandwidth capability to 4.2 MHz. Subsequently, in 1941, the first National Television Systems Committee adopted the vestigial sideband system using a total line rate of 525 lines that is used in the United States today.
Different pieces of what became TV existed in 1900, the challenge was putting them together. And that required a consensus among powerful players.
A kin to Ed Roberts, John Blakenbaker and Mark Dean invented the personal computer but Apple invented the PC as we know it.
Philo Farnsworth invented the cathode ray tube. unless you're writing this from the year 2009 or before, I'm going to have to push back on the idea that tv's TODAY are based on his technology. They most certainly are not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenjiro_Takayanagi
'Although he failed to gain much recognition in the West, he built the world's first all-electronic television receiver, and is referred to as "the father of Japanese television"'
He presented it in 1926 (Farnsworth in 1927)
However father of television was this dude:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_von_Ardenne
Better resolution, wireless transmission and Olympics 1936
I still have the reels, they look like this:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Films_Path%C3%A9-Bab...
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9-Baby
And we converted some of these reels to digital files (well brothers and I asked a specialized company to "digitalize" them).
100 years ago people already had cars, tramways (as a kid my great-grandmother tried to look under the first tramway she saw to see "where the horses were hiding"), cameras to film movies, telephones, the telegraph existed, you could trade the stock market and, well, it's knew to me but TV was just invented too.
On the other hand, it's just as fascinating to realize that all that, and ~everything that shapes modern life, did not exist until ~200 years ago. Not just appliances, but medicines and medicine, plastics and greases and other products of petrochemical industry and everything built on top of it, paints and cleaners and materials and so on...
Nowadays ..... hmmm. I no longer own a TV since many years. Sadly youtube kind of replaced television. It is not the same, quality-wise I think youtube is actually worse than e. g. the 1980s era. But I also don't really want to go back to television, as it also had low quality - and it simply took longer, too. On youtube I was recently watching old "Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst", in german. The old videos are kind of cool and interesting from the 1980s. I watched the new ones - it no longer made ANY sense to watch it ... the quality is much worse, and it is also much more boring. It's strange.
We saw a resurgence of this connection with big-budget serials like Game of Thrones, but now every streaming service has their own must-watch thing and it's basically as if everyone had their own personal broadcast station showing something different. I don't know if old-school television was healthy for society or not, but I do have a feeling of missing out on that shared connection lately.
Mass media isolates individuals who don't have access to it. I grew up without a TV, and when TV was all my neighbors could talk about, I was left out, and everyone knew it.
While other children were in front of the television gaining "shared experience", I built forts in the woods with my siblings, explored the creek in home made boats, learned to solder, read old books, wrote basic computer programs, launched model rockets, made up magic tricks. I had a great childhood, but I had a difficult time connecting with children whose only experiences were these shallow, shared experiences.
Now that media is no longer "shared", the fragmented content that people still consume has diminishing social value -- which in many cases was the only value it had. Which means there are fewer social consequences for people like me who choose not to partake.
I miss the days when everyone had seen the same thing I had.
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5646673/stranger-things...
Is it though? I of course watched TV as a kid through the 80s and have some feelings of nostalgia about it, but is it true that YouTube today is worse?
I mean, YouTube is nothing in particular. There's all sorts of crap, but Sturgeon's Law [1] applies here. There is also good stuff, even gems, if you curate your content carefully. YouTube can be delightful if you know what to look for. If you don't filter, yeah... it's garbage.
----
Diving into new topics on YT is delightful. The site becomes much better with sponsorblock+ublock origin+hide shorts/trending (unhook or blocktube)+replace clickbait titles+replace thumbnails (dearrow)+return youtube dislike.
Circles would have had a couple of advantages. First, I believe they would have been easier to make. From what I've read rectangles have more stress at the corners. Rounding the corners reduces that but it is still more than circles have. With circles they could have more easily made bigger CRTs.
Second, there is no aspect ratio thus avoiding the whole problem of picking an aspect ratio.
Electronically the signals to the XY deflectors to scan a spiral out from the center (or in from the edge if you prefer) on a circle are as easy to make as the signals to to scan in horizontal lines on a rectangle.
As far as I can tell that would have been fine up until we got computers and wanted to use TV CRTs as computer displays. I can't imagine how to build a bitmapped interface for such a CRT that would not be a complete nightmare to deal with.
https://www.earlytelevision.org/prewar_crts.html
They didn't really have the problem of picking an aspect ratio because motion pictures existed and that was already 4:3
And modern America asked itself, why can't it be both?
For example, page 26 has directions on how to pop by the local chemist to pick up materials to make your own selenium cell (your first imager) and page 29 covers constructing your first Televisor, including helpful tips like "A very suitable tin-plate is ... the same material out of which biscuit tins and similar light tinware is made. It is easily handled and can readily be cut with an ordinary pair of scissors. It is sold in sheets of 22 inches by 30 inches. Any ironmonger will supply these."
What strikes me is how fast the iteration was. Baird went from hatboxes and bicycle lenses to color TV prototypes in just two years. That's the kind of rapid experimentation we're seeing with AI right now, though compressed even further.
Edit: to make it clear, I absolutely did not miss having TV for even a second in all of those years.
BTW, I also still have a CRT in constant use - but the sources are now digital (It's my kitchen background TV - I feed it from a Raspberry PI with Kodi). On great thing about CRTs is that there's no computer inside monitoring what you watch.
If everyone agreed with that you wouldn't have to force them to pay the license and could sell subscriptions instead.
> I kind-of pity the US and other countries without a strong public TV system
I don't. At least they don't have to pay for their propaganda.
> Actually I have access to three TV markets via satellite (which includes UK with the BBC) and the amount of good content free to receive and record it much better than what Netflix offers.
That's like saying dumpster diving gets you better food than the sewers.
> On great thing about CRTs is that there's no computer inside monitoring what you watch.
Weird tangent when there are plenty of computer monitors based on non-CRT technologies. If CRTs were still being made today they wouldn't have any less anti-features.
I remember asking as a teenager if that because there are idiots on the box, or because you turn into one when you watch it.
The answer is “yes”
Have not had or watched one in well over 20 years.
I can't watch anything live unless Youtube is showing some live event (which it sometimes does). I could probably watch some live news using Pluto, but I never do.
The device is fantastic. Games, movies, shows, etc. There's a lot of utility in having a big, high-resolution screen as compared to a computer screen or, worse, a tiny phone screen. I love getting to relax on a couch and watch a favorite movie.
Cable and streaming are crap. Every year the prices go up, the content gets more fractured, the experience and service get worse, and it's just a bad time. I'm sick of promising new shows getting cancelled after 2 seasons. I'm sick of ENDLESS budget being spent on the most absurd CGI and effects instead of making something simpler and focused more on the story.
Video has a strange hypnotic power over most people and messages seem to bypass normal mental defenses.
Here is the first ad ever, for a watch : https://youtu.be/ho2OJfXkvpI
For comparison, here is the latest ad for the best selling watch as of today : https://youtu.be/kdMTc5WfnkM
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
My tv's have gone through real stress test in real life unlike factories
During childhood, we had our tv Switched on in morning 4:00 till 22:00 at night, constantly being watched 16-18 hrs a day during weekends and vacations (45 days), while least 10hrs a day during weekdays , for last 22 years
I only had 2 crt in my 30yrs of lifetime, Sansui and Samsung, channel broadcasters being changed from Tetrestrial Channels --> FTA Antenna --> Cable Tv --> Satellite Dish from time to time
Newer tv cannot cope up with such lenghty watchtimes,
Still RCA Only, no HDMI, Tv still have its Radio Antenna port on top
This privatization of leisure generates a vicious circle of isolation, transforming the active citizen into a member of a lonely crowd. In this atomized state, we lose our mētis—the practical, situated knowledge essential for self-governance—and become vulnerable to the high-modernist state's imposition of simplified, legible grids upon our lives. Furthermore, the media inundates us with the myths, preventing us from naming the world for ourselves. To break this cycle, we must move from submissiveness to a liberating praxis that reclaims our time to build alternative social institutions and counterhegemony through direct, face-to-face cooperation.
Why, even here on Hacker News we've corroborated my position regarding the necessity of breaking the "spectacle" through direct, generative action. On a recent thread about the "loneliness epidemic," HN folks argued that the epidemic is not merely an individual failing but a structural byproduct of a "death spiral" where digital convenience and "behavior modification schemes" have cannibalized the "real world". The community identifies that the privatization of leisure—manifested in car-centric suburban sprawl and the erasure of "third places"—has stripped us of the capacity for spontaneous encounter, leaving us waiting for "nicely packaged solutions" rather than facing the "great unknown" of human connection. Consequently, the proposed remedy aligns precisely: individuals must transition from passive consumers to active "Hosts", building "alternative social institutions" like non-profit event platforms that reject "dark patterns", organizing "physical social networks" on street corners, or reclaiming public spaces through guerilla cleanup efforts, effectively proving that we must "stop waiting for someone else" to reconstruct the civic dialogue.
[0] https://github.com/grishka/miscellaneous/blob/master/AVDecod...
This idea is why I always take media with a grain of salt. The decontexualization makes it easy for people to be reactive towards something, that isn’t logical
Eg “now this is why <insert person or group> is good/evil”
People call me the devils advocate when I point out these nuances but I just think we need to be much more critical when forming and holding opinions.
“Now this” is just a segue between unrelated topics.
Eg “and now a word from our sponsors”.
I eventually quit the job. I decided I didn't want to be a part of making our society worse by installing these devices that were causing manufactured outrage, hate, and selective truth telling.
Soon after I left, I found a book while thrifting that came out in 1978 called "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" by Jerry Mander. I laughed at the title and couldn't believe someone was already arguing for the detriments of TV before I was born. It's very well written and the points he makes are still relevant today.
From the wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...
Mander believes that "television and democratic society are incompatible" due to television removing all of society's senses except for seeing and hearing. The author states that television makes it so that people have no common sense which leads to...being "powerless to reject the camera's line of sight, reset the stage, or call on our own sensory apparatus to correct the doctored sights and sounds the machine delivers".
Mander's four arguments in the book to eliminate television are:
1. that telecommunication removes the sense of reality from people,
2. television promotes capitalism,
3. television can be used as a scapegoat, and
4. that all three of these issues negatively work together.
https://paleotronic.com/2018/09/15/gadget-graveyard-bairds-m...
http://www.tvdawn.com/earliest-tv/phonovision-experiments-19...
After making the call he noticed the crowd was still there so he parked his car and decided to investigate. There was a black and white TV broadcasting a Detroit Tigers game in the window of a radio repair shop. He told me that he came away impressed.
The family stayed with black and white until the late seventies. I remember the entire family watching the first moon landing. For the longest time I didn't know whether NASA was recording in color or not ;<).
It's not their exact words and I also forgot who said it. It's probably better for them we don't remember.
We never had the TV set in the lounge - it was meant for special occasions like tea and cake for family gatherings.
We still have a TV but it hardly used - everybody has iPads in the house.
When I get depressed and look out at the world, I'm actually amazed at what I'm living through—the internet, space travel, electric and autonomous cars, smartphones. It's really amazing.
All of these rapid technological advancements are a function of tremendous increases in energy available .
We passed peak conventional oil years ago and only see proven reserves increase because we redefined 'shale oil' as included under proven reserves. But shale oil has much lower EROEI than traditional oil. We can already see geopolitics heating up before our eyes to capture and control what remains, but to continue to advance society we need more energy.
On top of this we are just now starting to feel the impacts of the effects of the byproducts of this energy usage: climate change. What we are experiencing now is only a slight hint of what is to come in recent years.
In the next 80 years we'll very likely see an incredible decline in technology as certain complex systems no longer have adequate energy to maintain. The climate will continue to worsen and in more extreme ways, while geopolitics melts down in a struggle for the last bits of oil and fossil fuels (interestingly these combine in the fight for Greenland because a soon-to-be ice free arctic holds lots of oil, not enough to advance civilization the way it has been going, but enough to keep yours running if you can keep everyone else away).
I sincerely suspect within the next 80 years we will see the full collapse of industrial civilization and very possibly the near or complete extinction of the human race. You can see the early stages of this beginning to unfold right now.
There was a prototype 819-line analogue ''high definition'' system used to record The T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, with excellent results, but the recordings were committed to film for distribution since there was no apparatus for broadcasting it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.A.M.I._Show
There were also experiments by NHK of Japan with analogue HD broadcasting, but digital TV was so close on the horizon that it was mooted.
''High definition'' has been a relative term in the professional TV world all along, but became consumer buzzwords with the advent of digital TV in the early 2000's. Nowadays we know it to mean 720, 1080, or higher lines, usually in progressive scan.
Yet motion pictures are still stuck at 24 FPS to this day and there are even people who have strong opinions about this being a good thing.
Also just because NTSC was 29.97 Hz doesn't mean that the video content actually was - almost everything shot on film was actually effectively 23.97 Hz - telecined to 59.94 fields per second but that doesn't actually change the number of unique full frames.
As an example, the Wright brothers built a biplane that had wing warping instead of ailerons and a canard design. That bears little resemblance to most modern airplanes, but people have little trouble crediting it as “the invention of the airplane” —- questions of whether the Wrights were first or not notwithstanding.
Can ”TV” be thus simplified so that an electromechanical device with spinning discs qualifies?
Which the Wrights did with both controlled and powered in the 1903 Flyer.
(The Wrights invented the first 3-axis control system, and designed & built the first aviation engine capable of sustained flight.)
While the Wrights were first, by several years, its invention was inevitable.
I think television has had a negative effect on community and social interaction.
I think that LCD screens, huge digital bandwidth, and CCD sensors, have turned video ("television"), into a vast new landscape.
I'm old enough to remember putting foil on the rabbit-ears...
Edit: And Star Trek, and Cosmos
A shame since TV has so much potential as a medium.
I would be hesitant to pass judgement.
> […] This puts her at odds with much of the scientific community, including Drumlin, who pushes to defund SETI. Eventually, the project detects a signal from Vega, 26 light-years away, transmitting prime numbers.[a][b] Further analysis reveals a retransmission of Adolf Hitler's 1936 Olympic speech, the first TV signal to escape Earth's ionosphere.[1]
I am the Slime
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiCQcEW98OY
I am gross and perverted
I'm obsessed and deranged
I have existed for years
But very little has changed
I'm the tool of the Government
And industry too
For I am destined to rule
And regulate you
I may be vile and pernicious
But you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious
With the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get
Have you guessed me yet?
I'm the slime oozin' out
From your TV set
You will obey me while I lead you
And eat the garbage that I feed you
Until the day that we don't need you
Don't go for help, no one will heed you
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold
That's right, folks
Don't touch that dial
Well, I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor
I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go
I am the slime from your video
Oozin' along on your livin' room floor
I am the slime from your video
Can't stop the slime, people, look at me go
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Frank Zappa
I'm The Slime lyrics © Munchkin Music Co
- David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction
