My grandfather, John Norval Fricker, was a navy radio technician in WWII in the Pacific Theatre and had a career at WNBC New York as the chief engineer. He worked on bringing color TV on line and the family story is that he’d service the broadcast antenna on top of the Empire State Building, bringing a phone with him and call home to see how the picture looked.
Once when I was a kid he said to me “Analog Yes! Digital NO!”. This would have the 70s and it’s one of the few things I recall from him. He was a man of few words. But that stuck with me especially as I started to learn about computers of the digital kind. It was many years later, pondering it again, that I sought out the patent for color TV. And whoa – the analog signal processing that goes into transmitting the color signal is fascinating. Some kind of high level math and it’s all calculated using good old electronic components like resistors and capacitors. And tubes. Plenty of tubes. Real time processing too.
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