On Wed, 23 May 2012 16:37:22 -0700 (PDT), spamtrap1888
wrote:

Which promptly put all "the works" on one pc board.

At the time, before robotic components and board handling, if you cut
a board in half, it would double the price. Each board had to carry
its own cost burden of stuffing, handling, soldering, testing,
inventory, shipping, etc, not to mention the interconnect costs. It
was a huge cost savings to put everything on a single board, with one
exception. If the yield was lousy and the board did not have
sufficient test points and documentation to repair, then all the cost
savings went into the dumpster.

At that time, Zenith was suing the Japanese for dumping TVs at less
than cost in the US.

Zenith was an oddity. While everyone else was promoting the benefits
of printed circuit boards, Zenith was proclaiming the superiority of
their "hand wired" chassis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenith_Electronics#Hand_Wired_Chassis

But apparently the US government had a conscious
policy of yielding the US consumer electronics business to Japan, in
order to keep them a happy ally.

Yep. I don't know the details, but I was told that the import duties
and tax laws of late 1960's were structured to make it cheaper to
build a product in Japan, than in the USA. Also, Japan's import
duties made it prohibitively expensive to import consumer products
into Japan.

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