1967: General Electric Porta-Color M213CWD Color Television

General Electric Porta-Color M213CWD Color Television

Remember a few years ago when HD was the new thing? 720p 1080i and 1080p, loads of technical terms and marketing to get you to buy these new-fangled plasmas and LCDs, when most people were content with their old-fashioned tube televisions. But as the sets got cheaper, and people saw the crisp, clear picture next to a standard-definition TV, people started to buy only HD sets, no more big, heavy, bulky TVs. Now, it's a huge let-down to go to someone's house and find out they have a now relatively tiny, fuzzy, awful tube television.

Same kind of thing happened in the 60's, everyone who had a TV had a black and white set, ginormous box "console" units that were as big as coffee tables, sometimes including record players and radios. The screens were not much larger than 20". And you didn't just walk into a Walmart and swipe your credit card to get one of these, no this was like buying a car, a major purchase that many people financed. Owning more than one TV was like imagining owning two houses, ridiculous.

Then, they started coming out with COLOR! Unimaginably expensive for the average family, that changed with the first, smaller, "portable" televisions made by General Electric, back when it was known as "General Electric" and made TV's in America. I happen to now own one, thanks to a close friend who had it in her garage.

In 1966, General Electric unveailed their Porta-Color technology. Prior to that, color televisions used a technology developed by RCA known as Shadow Mask developed in 1950. Unfortunately, shadow-mask lost 85% of the picture brightness to create the color image and required enormous amounts of electricity. General Electric now had a major advantage, as this new technology required far less power. The original 11" set cost $250 in 1966 ($1,790 in 2013), and by 1968 there were many sets for $200-$300, leading to the popularization of color television in the United States. Porta-color TVs were marketed nearly unchanged to 1978. I'm pretty proud to own one of the first affordable color television sets. Not to mention, it is completely built in the USA. Only recently are companies starting to make TVs in the US again, for a long time there were no TV's made in the US.

But man, was technology primitive then! When I first turned it on, I thought the screen was broken because lights came on the knobs and controls but nothing happened with the picture. But then it slowly started to light up, this set takes a whole 45 seconds for the screen to light up, not to mention the 3 or 4 minutes it takes for the picture to look colored properly. And then I notice little amber lights inside the set. At first, I panicked thinking I was burning up the electronics inside, but, silly me, this thing doesn't have any transistors or computer chips. It's filled with VACUUM TUBES, that give off a lot of heat and an amber light.

Lots of controls? Wait till you see the back.

So, being 46 years old, you can expect things to be broken or flaky. Especially with these old analog knobs, they just don't work right They either control things erratically, or barely work at all. Luckily, most of the front knobs work at least enough to manage. So here's what they do. The two big knobs are actually each 2 knobs in 1. The inner knob changes channels, the top one controls VHF (2-13), and the bottom UHF (14-83). The outer rim when turned fine-tunes the channel to get a good picture. Unfortunately the VHF fine-tune only worked in one direction, so I ended up tuning it completely out. Had to open it up and fiddle with the mechanical doohicky to get it to work in the other direction too. The beauty of things without computer chips-you can easily fix them. OFF-VOL turns the power, and keeps turning to control volume. The speaker is flaky and probably on it's way out, it barely works, but its loud and clear if you turn it just right. Sound must not have been a priority back then, because it really sucks. BRIGHT controls brightness, that knob works. VERT was a control that was fairly common, sometimes the screen goes wild and looks like its moving below the bottom of the screen and coming out of the top in a continuous loop, fiddle with this to get the picture to be stable. COLOR controls color saturation, from black & white to over-colored. TINT goes from green people to purple people, somewhere in the middle is the right color. All these knobs have to be adjusted just right to get a clear picture. That is, if all the back controls are set right too.

All those round holes are controls...

Nothing was automatic or calibrated at the factory on these damn things... it took me 10 minutes to get a barely decent picture on this thing. It has 3 screw-knobs for red, green, and blue color control, balance all of them to get a proper picture. Then two knobs for blue and green brightness...which adjusted brightness for only those colors...again balance them to get a proper color picture...along with the other three...now that was hard. Then there is a horizontal picture control, that white knob. It was pretty flaky and loose feeling. Turn it too far in any direction and the picture pops and turns into a bright line in the middle of the screen, but basically it controls the how flat or tall the picture is. Another screw knob...well it seems to do the same thing but is somehow different...it's basically impossible to get the picture to fit inside the screen borders anyway. For example, the ticker you see on the bottom of ESPN or CNN would be cut off on the sides and bottom of the screen, and probably not be visible at all. Another knob is AGC, which I think is Automatic Gain Control, which amplifies the signal coming from the antenna. Analog channels aren't broadcasted anymore so it's not so important for the direct connection I have going into it (no cable on this thing). Another knob on the end controls contrast, it's pretty flaky, I can't seem to get it to be any less washed out. And finally there is a switch-button thing that is called degauss, if you've ever put a magnet near an old computer monitor or tube television you know the picture gets a weird purple green bubble on it that permanently distorts the picture unless you degauss it. Computer monitors commonly had this function...but late model tube TV's didn't...not sure why they quit putting them on TVs...

Not only did you need 2 different antennas, but you had to screw them in.

I needed an adapter to hook up my VCR, to hook up my cable box, to give me picture on this TV. It has one built in rabbit-ear antenna, you pull out two poles and and adjust, but that was only for VHF chanels. You needed a separate antenna shaped in a circle to get UHF channels. Though often back then there were only 3 or 4 channels that were all on the VHF band anyway. Picture was...well...not so great. One thing I noticed in comparing it to my 1976 Sony TV, is that there is no snow on this TV. No signal it's just a gray screen, if there's a snowy picture on the '76, there isn't on the '67. Very odd and interesting that this really old TV had a snow-free picture that even LCD's can't reproduce.

Comparing picture between my two old TV's. Notice the snow on the Sony and none on the top.

It's hard to tell from the picture but the color, contrast, and the picture in general is better on the Sony, from 1976. I have the same signal going to both TVs. The General Electric is very washed out and somewhat distorted. But the snow ruins it on the Sony...despite all the washing out out and distortion the picture I would say actually seems better on the General Electric. Even my big, new 2013 big screen TV has snow when I hook certain things up to it. It's very interesting. If I can get the contrast to work right I might actually get the picture to look really good.

Thanks for reading!

1979: Mattel Electronics Intellivision

Mattel Electronics Intellivision

So the Xbox One and Play Station 4 have just came out, promising insanely realistic gaming, lots of streaming media like Netflix and movies and music, and next-generation goodness. On the other side of the spectrum, are thousand-dollar desktop computers built for super gaming, that far surpass the Xbox One and PS4 in specs and ability. Oh, and they can actually do real work, unlike the Xbox One or PS4. Consoles have been like this forever, that is at least since the mid-80s. At one time, the line between computers and game consoles was blurred, they were one and the same, hooking up to your TV, and letting you play primitive games on cartridges, and some, with the proper attachments, let you do simple programming and word processing. One well known system from that time, that still has a cult following today, is the Mattel Electronics Intellivision.

Origin & How it Works:

I found this in a retro game shop in Malvern, Arkansas. It was in full working condition at a good deal, well except that on the right controller, some of the keypad buttons aren't working. Let's talk about the controllers for a moment...shall we?

What are these, telephones or video game controllers??

Wow. Quite different from modern controllers. The disk serves as the joystick, you can rock it in 16 directions (quite a few for the time, the Atari only supported 8 directions) and press it in the middle. There is a keypad, that you could cover with an overlay that would have animations and indicators for what all the buttons would do for that particular game. there are two buttons on either side, usually acting as fire buttons.

This would slide over the buttons so that you could tell what the buttons do.

Overall, its a very cumbersome controller to play with on some games, though with others it can be pretty useful. The right controller as I said has some buttons broken, which would be ok if I could just replace it, but that's not so easy, since the controllers are hard wired into the console! This wouldn't be a big deal for me, since I can open it up and unplug it, but since they are normally not replaceable there aren't many spares in existence. Plus they are hard to fix, since all they are on the inside is cheap plastic sheets sandwiched together. So I'll have to keep my eye out for spares and do my best to fix the controller I have.

A classic game, Astrosmash.

The Intellivision had one slot on the right side where you could insert games, and later add-ons for the console were developed that would plug into this slot. The games were really hard to insert, and they had to be inserted just so to be started correctly. For example, my particular copy of Astrosmash has to be inserted slightly crooked to start properly. All the cartridges made for the Intellivision look basically the same.

Check out that wood grain on brown plastic with gold accent! The pinnacle of class.

The Intellivision hooks into the TV traditionally with one cord, that plugs into a box with a switch, that hooks into the TV with screws and with an antenna or cable connection hooked into the box. Modern technology has replaced this cumbersome, unreliable, obsolete box with a tiny adapter that just converts the old coax game connection straight into the cable coax connector on the TV. Tune to channel 3 (or 4 if you flip a switch under the Intellivision) and you can play!

No HDMI here.

One thing the Intellivision had the Atari 2600 beat on was with graphics, they were far higher resolution and you could usually tell what the shapes on the screen represented. Still nothing close to modern consoles though. Sound was...definitely like Atari 2600. Primitive and sometimes hilarious. And then in 1982 they released the Intellivoice module!

Oh yeah, the Intellivoice module!

The Intellivoice had a special processor chip that enabled real voices to play during games. You shoved this box into the game cartridge slot, then shoved the game into the box. Computers in this time had a habit of having one expansion slot and just daisy-chaining add-ons. A particular TI home computer had so many add-ons you could grow it to be 8 or 9 feet long! It even had a convenient additional volume wheel just for voices. Only a very few games were released that had voices on them, they were expensive and not very popular, the Intellivoice was ultimately a flop. I have one Intellivoice game, Space Spartans. The voices enable you to get information through voice prompts rather than on screen displays or gauges, an innovative way to overcome graphic limitations that made on screen counters and gauges impossible to display. Unfortunately it didn't catch on and it's just an oddity now.

Imagine shoving a box into the side of an Xbox 360 to get better graphics...

There was a heavily advertised keyboard component for the intellivision that would have enabled word processing and turn the Intellivision into a home computer, but it was delayed and ultimately cancelled. Later on they did release a computer component, but it was not well received, only a few programs were made for it before it was cancelled. There was even an online game service, where you could plug your Intellivision into a compatible cable television service and download new games every month, the first downloadable game service of its kind.

So that's the Intellivision, I've uploaded some videos so you can see the graphics and gameplay, check the Space Spartans video to hear voices through the Intellivoice module!