Bob the Tomato wrote:
On Sun, 25 Nov 2007 15:47:43 GMT, John Horner
wrote:

J. Clarke wrote:
The question you should be asking is why the U.S. completely
wasted their superiority.
Obvious answer, they were reaping in the profits, instead of
spending
some of that money to improve quality and R&D in new
technologies.

The big problem was that they were heavily invested in tube
technology and didn't really understand the potential of solid
state.

That is total BS. Transistors and integrated circuits were
invented
in the US are continue to be manufactured by US companies in
volume.
Motorola was a leader in televisions with it's Quasar brand and
also
was a big leader in semiconductors.

Ditto RCA in it's heyday.

There was no lack of US involvement in solid state technology or
manufacturing. In fact to this day it is one area where the US
still
has a major industrial base.

John

It's a fact that HDTV was pushed by the govt

When was it "pushed by the govt"? There wasn't even a standard for
it until 1996, at which time there were no US television
manufacturers.

as a jump start to Zenith

You mean the Zenith division of my favorite Korean electronics
manufacturer, Lucky-Goldstar?

and Quasar

You mean Quasar division of Matsu****a Electronics (aka "Panasonic")?

and Curtis Mathis.

You mean the K-Mart house brand?

The idea was that the consumers would
have to upgrade to a new TV set that would HAVE to be made in the
USA,
since the Japanese wouldn't have the capability of making them. It
was a given that it would be an incredible boost to the USA TV
manufacturers. And so HDTV was invented.

This was in 1976. (It's a fact.)

If in 1976 anybody in the electronics industry thought that the
Japanese couldn't make HDTV they were damned fools. France
demonstrated their first HDTV in 1949, the Soviet Union in 1958, and
Panasonic in 1974. And it's difficult to see how something that had
been running commercially since the early '50s could have been
"invented" in 1976.

Of course, no TV sets have been manufactured in the USA for over 5
years. Zenith is now LG, and overseas, BTW.

And Quasar was Panasonic, and overseas, in 1976. By the way, Zenith
was bought by LG in 1995, a year before there was an HDTV standard.

--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)