It’s easy enough to pick an arbitrary product from history and use it as a fulcrum to leer back into the past, but some seem to have been built with preternatural anticipation of future reflection. The “RCA Two Thousand” television, for one: built in 1969, in limited edition of 2,000 units, sold for a then-staggering $2,000 a pop. (That’s just shy of $12k in today’s dollars.) Its console design is downright modern, with a rosewood top and a translucent, presumably plastic front panel that opens to reveal a 23-inch tube that “gives such a vivid, detailed picture, you can even watch it in a brightly lit room.”
RCA goes on to crow about how they used computers to build this television: computers to design it; computers to test it; computers to calculate the number of migrant workers needed to harvest the rosewood. They even put “computer-like ‘memory’ circuits” inside the Two Thousand that remembered where VHF stations were at on the dial — you used to have to tune television stations in by turning a knob, kids — making it possible to move from active channel to active channel, skipping any unused stations.
Even the ad copy kicker dates it: “Once for $2,000, all you got was a trip around the world. Now you can travel to a whole new century.” Could they have imagined a time when our television screens were as wide as the front panel of their whole console, only a few inches thick, and even less expensive? And that flights around the world would have fallen similarly, if only for a while?
RCA’s Two Thousand (1969) [PaleoFuture.com]
It’s 2008 and I still haven’t bought a widescreen TV.
CRT Mafia, reprazentz!
WEGA, mah nehga!