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Maxed Out: Do Not Adjust Your Set
April 4, 2012 |Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
In my last column I started to reminisce and ruminate on how technology has evolved so dramatically, from having a single rotary telephone in one’s house (if you were lucky) to everyone having cell phones in their pockets. And we didn’t even talk about the fact that today’s smartphones offer features like high-resolution digital cameras and GPS capabilities and all sorts of other incredible things.
Another technology that has evolved in leaps and bounds is that of television. When I was a kid, we had a single black-and-white television, which occupied a place of pride in our family room. I remember that the first thing you did in those days when a guest arrived at your house was to turn the television off – it would have been considered to be outrageously rude to leave it running in the background.
Of course, this sort of thing would only have occurred in the evenings or the weekends, because the television company didn’t transmit anything during most of the daytime during the week. We only had two channels in England in those days (circa the early 1960s), as I recall, and the kids’ programs started around 4:00 pm on the weekdays. At 6:00 pm the news came on, signaling the fact that we were moving into the adults programs.
As an aside, adults in those days didn’t ask kids if it was OK to change the channel, or even turn the television off. It would simply never have struck them to even think of asking. Adults did whatever they felt like doing and kids just had to put up with it – that’s just the way things were and we kids never thought of questioning it.
Both of my parents worked, so after school I would spend the afternoons “up the road” at my Auntie Barbara’s house with my cousin Gillian. Sometime before the kids programs started, Gillian and I would turn the television on. Remember that these old televisions were based on cathode ray tube (CRT) technology, so the screens were very small compared to today’s monsters. Also, when you first turned the television on, the picture would start off small in the middle of the screen and then grow to fill the screen.
And what was this picture? It was called the “test pattern” or the “test card.” If you go to Google and select the Images tab and then do a search for “television test pattern,” you will be presented with test patterns from around the world. The image below is a sketch I made showing the way in which I remember things.
Figure 1. A BBC test pattern from the "olden days" of my youth.
Used since the earliest TV broadcasts, test cards were originally physical cards at which a television camera was pointed. The idea was for the engineers at the television studio to use this image for calibration and alignment of the various pieces of equipment in the signal path. A few minutes before the kids’ shows started, some music would begin to play. Then, precisely at 4:00 pm, the test pattern would be replaced by the program and the fun would begin.
As another aside, although I would usually have been in bed long before this, on special occasions like Christmas I was allowed to stay up late with my parents and relatives. The last program of the day was the news. I think this finished around 10:00 or 10:30 pm. When it did finish, the television company would play the national anthem, and all of the adults would stand while this was playing. Actually, come to think about it, when you went to the cinema, they would play the national anthem before the start of the show, and – once again – everyone in the theater would stand while the anthem was playing.
We didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up. Not that we went hungry or anything, but my parents didn’t have a lot of cash to splash around. But you don’t need money to have fun – on weekends we would all go window shopping through the center of town. It was on one of these excursions that I saw my first color television. I think I must have been about six or so at the time.
We were walking along when we passed a big department store. One of the windows contained a display of televisions, all showing the same program (remember we had only two channels). All of the televisions were black-and-white except one color television, which was located in the center of the display. In Figure 2, we see another one of my little sketches.
Figure 2. Window-shopping at the department store during the aforementioned olden days.
This picture really doesn’t do things justice – it was a huge department store and a huge display. There must have been 30 or more televisions of all shapes and sizes. But the thing I remember the most was the color television. Prior to seeing this display, it had simply never struck me that you could create a television that could display color images. I think my parents were equally astounded, because the three of us stood there for ages with our noses pressed against the window.
I could never have imagined how things would evolve over time. For example, it would never have struck any of us that one day it would be common to have televisions throughout the house. We have a flat-screen unit in the kitchen, one in each of the bedrooms, one in the study, and a big high-definition display in the family room. Similarly, I could never have imagined having hundreds of channels to choose from, or having a DVR built into the desktop box allowing one to record hours and hours of programs, or being able to stream NetFlix to the TV from the wireless router, or any of the other mega-cool things you can do.
And some of the innovations that are racing towards us will make you squeal with delight, such as the next-generation 4K2K displays, which will blow today’s high-definition displays out of the water. For example, the current high-definition 1080p format presents images that contain 2 megapixels, but the next-generation 4K2K displays will boast 4096 x 2400 pixels (that’s 10 megapixels). And there are even wall-size 8K4K displays on the drawing board.
And don’t even get me started on 3D. Yes, it’s true that today’s 3D offerings leave a lot to be desired, but in the not-so-distant future home televisions will boast incredibly realistic 3D images without the need to sit directly in front of the display or to wear special glasses.
In some respects it’s difficult to wrap one’s brain around what the future holds. To be honest, I think we all think we know what to expect, but I honestly believe that we don’t actually have a clue. If I think back to when I was a kid, we never even dreamed about cell phones and high-definition television. At the beginning of the 1990s, no one dreamed about the Internet the way it is today (although a rudimentary version of the Internet was being used by academia, the general public didn’t hear anything about it until the Mosaic web browser was launched in 1993). Fifteen years ago no one dreamed of having a digital camera in their smart phone. Ten years ago no one dreamed of having a smartphone with GPS capabilities.
The bottom line is that, yes, things will get smarter and faster, and television screens will get bigger and better and more beautiful, but this is only the tip of the iceberg – the “low-hanging fruit” of ideas that we can all understand. What I can’t wait to see is the new technologies of which I am currently unaware, or blissfully ignorant, if you wish. All I know is that the future promises to be very exciting indeed.
Until next time, have a good one!
Clive (Max) Maxfield is founder/consultant at Maxfield High-Tech Consulting. He is the author and co-author of a number of books, including Bebop to the Boolean Boogie (An Unconventional Guide to Electronics) and How Computers Do Math featuring the pedagogical and phantasmagorical virtual DIY Calculator. To contact Max, click here.