As I write elsewhere on this QwikMall site, my first radio was a 9-transistor pocket model from Japan that I got in the late 1950s. Then with my paper route earnings, I saved enough to buy a bigger model about one foot high, one foot wide, and six inches deep that fit under my bed. I would listen to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ baseball games on it and since they were in the east and I was in California, the games were over before I had to go to bed. That radio lasted until I gave it to my brothers in 1964 when I went into the military. I bought another radio, smaller than the last, but still a tube-type receiver. Then I moved on to component stereo systems in the 1970s and didn’t change much after that.
The first television I remember seeing, in 1954, had a very small screen with very rounded corners, and my family all crowded around it watching all the current programming. Our neighbors had a Zenith television with a round screen – indeed, it was like watching television as if it were an oscilloscope. We had seven channels in Los Angeles at the time. I’m not sure, but I don’t think the word “video” had appeared in our lexicon. At any rate, we were never wanting for adventure on “the tube,” although one of us kids was the designated “channel changer” when we wanted to watch something else. The first television remote I saw was a device about one pound in weight, it had a dial to change the channels, and it was connected to the back of the television by a signal-carrying cord. What a change has occurred since I was a child. We have televisions with lifelike pictures and infrared remotes to change channels without wires (or designated channel-changing kids). We have progressed from video tape to DVDs. And even the DVDs have progressed to Blu-Ray video, where the pictures on your television are so incredible you have to see them to believe them. Camcorders, too, have improved so much over the years, as well as decreasing in price.
All of the products in my recommendations here are worth looking over. You will be amazed at the quality versus price.
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