Spending time with Fred and Barney

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by WA3WLJ

What did Barney do for a Living ?

Didn't he work at the same quarry as Fred?

[old_tv_nut]

Originally Posted by Ed in Tx

If the source is MeTV which broadcasts The Flintstones, they partially zoom in on a lot of the old 4:3 shows to help fill out a 16:9 screen without cutting off too much of the top and bottom, which may answer why it doesn't fit the roundie viewing area.

This.

Looking at those images, it's obvious that the text extends beyond the safe title area even for a rectangular tube.

[WA3WLJ]

Barney Rubble is the secondary main character and Fred's best friend and next-door neighbor. His occupation is, for the most part of the series, unknown, though later episodes depict him working in the same quarry as Fred.

From Wikipedia

[vortalexfan]

Originally Posted by jhalphen

Hi to all,

Here's my first color TV, a 1967 30 tube job made by ITT-Oceanic. 1st generation Color in France for the intro of color TV in Oct 1967. Very complicated as dual standard 819 line B&W + 625 SECAM color. An unusual feature is an EM87 "Magic Eye" ribon tuning indicator. Price when new was 4500 French Francs, +/- the price of a cheap car.

I got the set in 1970 (i was 17) a gift from a well-healed person who was upgrading to a newer model. Back then, i new nothing about color TV repair, just theoretical stuff, so i purchased all the books i could find (5) and tackled the set from page 1, chapter 1.
No advice & no Internet forums back then.
Found out it had 3 faults (V Scan, Convergence board component failures and color decoder dead "permutator" diodes.
Once fixed, i then spent considerable time converging the set (19 controls in total) and a real PIA because of the dual line scan rates.
Also changed all the power tubes in the H/V sections & EHT power supply.
Because of the 450VA power consumption & 30 tubes, i left the back off for the rest of its life & posted a Danger! Warning! HV on my room's door to keep anyone from entering & "dusting".
The TV ran beautifully thereafter without one failure until i left home in 1977.
My father then used it until the early 80s when he purchased a new Sony 19" Trinitron. The Oceanic was given away.

I owe to this set a solid founding foundation in color TV circuitry, theory & practice. I took 4 months to cover everything & learn Scope waveforms via a Kyoritsu 3 MHz single trace tube oscilloscope with AC-only coupling.

Beware of tube sources !
Some of my power section tubes bore the RFT label. Now unknown to me, RFT tubes were DDR manufactured & had lousy/no quality control. A brand new EL519 H output tube red-plated instantly upon power on. Pulled the plug ASAP & saved my flyback.
The EL519 was supposedly a higher power rating replacement for the original EL509.
Needless to say, they all went back to the shop & traded against Philips/Telefunken tubes at much higher cost.

My 2 cents contribution to this memory lane thread...

PS : i have the complete DVD bookcase collection of the Flinstones.

Best Regards
jhalphen
Paris/France

I think its interesting that in the ad for your TV that it calls the tubes "transistors".

A typo perhaps?

Because as far as I know tubes and transistors are two completely different things.

[Tom9589]

No typo. Look more closely at the ad. They show both transistors and tubes at the bottom of the ad. This set contained both transistors and tubes.

[jhalphen]

Hi to all,

Thanks to Tom9589 for correcting, the Oceanic TV had 30 tubes & 7 transistors.
UHF tuner was transistorized, from memory, nothing else.

Best Regards
jhalphen
in (deserted) Paris
France

[FrankDuVal]

My job in high school was fixing television and radios in my home shop, so my family's first color sets were customer's sets I was burning in to make sure they were repaired correctly.

It was several years of that before my parents got a hand me down......wait for it......RCA CTC16! Fixed it up and it ran until replaced by a Zenith all solid state in the early 80s.

[JohnCT]

Originally Posted by FrankDuVal

It was several years of that before my parents got a hand me down......wait for it......RCA CTC16!

All those early RCAs were sweet performers, the 16 no exception. Dad bought our first color TV in 1959, an Admiral with the RCA built CTC11 and 21" round tube in it. We ran that until 1976 or so.

John

[oldtvman]

Originally Posted by JohnCT

All those early RCAs were sweet performers, the 16 no exception. Dad bought our first color TV in 1959, an Admiral with the RCA built CTC11 and 21" round tube in it. We ran that until 1976 or so.

John

Those were the magical days of color. You knew it existed, you may have seen it in department stores and the shows were few and far between. I still have memories of seeing color in the later 50's, I believe it was the price is right.