RCA and You

[mpatoray]

What was salvageable form the Sarnoff museum (a lot of which was stored in the basement which had major flooding issues) was donated to the Hagley museum, including such priceless things as Zworykin's "Television notebook #1". Other bots when to the New Jersey Historical society and also the Infoage museum.

http://www.hagley.lib.de.us

http://www.jerseyhistory.org

http://www.infoage.org

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by mpatoray

What was salvageable form the Sarnoff museum (a lot of which was stored in the basement which had major flooding issues)

I remember that basement area. When I worked there, there would be abandoned racks and odds and ends down there, some of which I grabbed for my work. Figured, why wait for an order to come in, here's a rack I can use right now. Just stuff ten to twenty years old, nothing interesting from a history angle. There also was a big power transformer labeled "contains PCBs" down there behind a chain link fence style door.

As for GE taking over RCA, that videodisc debacle (RCA dropped about $660 million on it, big money back then) probably prompted the investors to get some better managers on RCA... Turned out we ended up with evil managers from GE.

[zenith2134]

Yes, it seems as though hardly any collector wants to save some of the later RCA chassis sets... I try to save them all however. Even if they were pieces of crap or there was greed involved, etc. Remember there was a time when round crt color sets were undesirable/considered old junk.
One day the 70s and 80s color sets will be just a memory.
I have a CTC-89 somewhere which has a nice pic and build quality, for instance. It's from '77

[wa2ise]

Originally Posted by zenith2134

One day the 70s and 80s color sets will be just a memory.
I have a CTC-89 somewhere which has a nice pic and build quality, for instance. It's from '77

I kinda wish I still had my old CTC101, the 1st I think RCA with a comb filter.
Made a nice sharp picture, with extended luma bandwidth from the comb filter.
Also the infamous integrated flyback, that would short out and take the HOT with it. Which is what it died from. Also the CTC111 was pretty good.

[zenith2134]

Nice! I was once given a CTC-117 which had memory for the channels and on screen display. It was from 1983, old enough that the multisection filter can was labeled as a 'condenser' on the prints. Wish I would have saved that one.