The Good Old Days

When were TheGoodOldDays? Ah, that was back when things made sense. Lots of jobs, economy running a record surplus, world peace, a constitutional democracy, and James Coburn was still alive.

In other words, 2 years ago. Some would say 52 years ago.

Ah, this page will age well.

{All we need is a good fad bubble that foreign investors also buy into. Just save up for the poppage.}

Tubes

When I was a young kid, my mother would fix the TV by pulling out all of the TV tubes, wrapping them in news pages, and then carrying them all down-town to a big drug store which had a coin-operated tube-tester machine. She'd plug them into the matching slots one by one and see which ones were good and which were sour. I couldn't help her because I was too short.

Then she'd go to the back of the store to find matches for the sour tubes based on the codes printed on the tube slots. (Often the label was worn/cooked off the tube itself such that the slot labels on the tester were the only way to tell.)

I'd generally consider her a "technophobe", but she did it in a very routine fashion as if she'd done it dozens of times before. People just got used to tubes back then.

At least TV's were partly repairable. Now the repair costs are often more than a new TV. Or do we call them "monitors" now? Oh, and Get off my lawn!

As an avid collector and restorer of retro-tech I did this regularly until about twelve years ago, when I sold my tube tester and moved to another country. There are thousands of tube types but a limited number of socket types, and a limited number of sockets on a given tester. Therefore, most tube testers provide an extensive catalogue of tube types (typically as a "roller-blind" scroll or a booklet) that, for a given tube, tells the user which socket to put it in (on larger testers, there are multiple identical sockets) and how to set the bank of switches and dials that configure the tester for that tube. The tube type for each tube is printed on it, but if it's been cooked off (fairly rare, fortunately) you have to refer to the tube location guide printed inside or on the back of the TV or whatever, a published circuit diagram, or -- as you get good at this -- simply recognise the tube from its internal structure.

{What's a tube?}

"Valve", in colloquial UK vernacular.

This is a tube tester: