Comment

Comment by accounting2026

Yes knew what you meant, and fully agree. It is fascinating TV is even possible just out of all these rather simple and bulky analog components. Even the first color TV's were with vacuum tubes and no transitors.

As I recall there's all kinds of hacks in the design to keep them cheap. For instance, letting the fly-back transformer for producing the high voltages needed operate at the same frequency as the horizontal scan rate (~15 kHz) so that mechanism essentially serves double duty. The same was even seen in microcomputers where the same crystal needed for TV was also used for the microprocessor - meaning that e.g. a "European" Commodore 64 with PAL was actually a few percent slower than an American C64 with NTSC. And other crazy things like that.

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton