Kevin said:

Well the video does have some turning in it and may well spark a smile
from those here who have messed about a bit with old-timey radio
tubes. I still remember when all the grocery stores had a small
machine in the corner somewhere where customers could test and buy
tubes for their tvs and radios.

Try a foxhole radio. A razor blade, lead from pencil, and headphones
(and of course, a long wire antenna and ground.). Not very selective,
but way back when, few had more than one strong station to choose
from. If you were rich (comparatively, for a kid) you could spring
for a cat's whisker and wind your own tuning coil. If you were really
well off, you bought a 365pf variable tuning cap as well. As a child
I worked in a television shop to pay the mortgage. I got $3, they got
the other $23. 4 repairs would pay their mortgage for the month. This
was at the cusp of tubes vs. semiconductors. By 10, I was climbing on
roofs around Atlanta installing TV antennas for round tube CRT color
televisions and doing the bulk of repairs.

The tube testers were marketing tools used to sell tubes - and for the
most part, utterly useless. Fortunately, semiconductors had become the
norm by my teens, although there were holdouts who still owned TVs
with vacuum tubes. The transistor put many a diddling moron out of
the TV business. Built my first computer from plans in a magazine in
high school, but there were no O.S.'s to speak of - unless you wrote
your own in the native CPU machine code. Made $13 an hour in 1980 and
bought a house whose mortgage was $198. In 1988 IBM payed the
insulting sum of $7.50 an hour until they tossed my office in the
street because I sued some politically connected dirtbag lawyer. Then
everything was shipped overseas for manufacture, is now assembled by
machines, and nothing is repairable. Your average mortgage is now
$700+, most jobs pay less than 20 years ago, and 32 different
pink-handed money-changers have their hands in your back pocket. For
the first time in history, the father had it WAY easier than the son.
What a country, an era, cursed by being born into.


Greg G.