Enhanced Definition TV: “A Poor Man’s High-Def”

September 18, 2025 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

Although to many of us the progression from ‘standard definition’ TV and various levels of high-definition at 720p or better seemed to happen smoothly around the turn of the new century, there was a far messier technological battle that led up to this. One of these contenders was Enhanced Definition TV (EDTV), which was 480p in either 4:3 or 16:9, as a step up from Standard Definition TV (SDTV) traditional TV quality. The convoluted history of EDTV and the long transition to proper HDTV is the subject of a recent video by [VWestlife].

One reason why many people aren’t aware of EDTV is because of marketing. With HDTV being the hot new bullet point to slap on a product, a TV being widescreen was often enough to market an EDTV with 480p as ‘HD’, not to mention the ‘HD-compatible’ bullet point that you could see everywhere.

That said, the support for digital 480p and ‘simplified 1080i’ signals of EDTV makes these displays still quite usable today, more than SDTV CRTs and LCDs that are usually limited to analog signals-only at regular NTSC, PAL or SECAM. It may not be HD, but at least it’s enhanced.

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Forgotten Internet: The Story Of Email

September 17, 2025 by Al Williams 22 Comments

It is a common occurrence in old movies: Our hero checks in at a hotel in some exotic locale, and the desk clerk says, “Ah, Mr. Barker, there’s a letter for you.” Or maybe a telegram. Either way, since humans learned to write, they’ve been obsessed with getting their writing in the hands of someone else. Back when we were wondering what people would do if they had a computer in their homes, most of us never guessed it would be: write to each other. Yet that turned out to be the killer app, or, at least, one of them.

What’s interesting about the hotel mail was that you had to plan ahead and know when your recipient would be there. Otherwise, you had to send your note to their home address, and it would have to wait. Telegrams were a little better because they were fast, but you still had to know where to send the message.

Early Days

An ad from the 1970s with a prominent Telex number

In addition to visiting a telegraph office, or post office, to send a note somewhere, commercial users started wanting something better at the early part of the twentieth century. This led to dedicated teletype lines. By 1933, though, a network of Teletype machines — Telex — arose. Before the Internet, it was very common for a company to advertise its Telex number — or TWX number, a competing network from the phone company and, later, Western Union — if they dealt with business accounts.

Fax machines came later, and the hardware was cheap enough that the average person was slightly more likely to have a fax machine or the use of one than a Telex.

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Tefifon: Germany’s Tape-Shaped Record Format

August 28, 2025 by Maya Posch 15 Comments

A Tefifon cartridge installed for playback. (Credit: Our Own Devices, YouTube)

Recently the [Our Own Devices] YouTube channel took a gander at the Tefifon audio format. This was an audio format that competed with shellac and vinyl records from the 1930s to the 1960s, when the company behind it went under. Some people may already know Tefifon as [Matt] from Techmoan has covered it multiple times, starting with a similar machine about ten years ago, all the way up to the Stereo Tefifon machine, which was the last gasp for the format.

There’s a lot to be said for the Tefifon concept, as it fixes many of the issues of shellac and vinyl records, including the limited run length and having the fragile grooves exposed to damage and dust. By having the grooves instead on a flexible band that got spooled inside a cartridge, they were protected, with up to four hours of music or eight hours of spoken content, i.e. audio books.

Although the plastic material used for Tefifon bands suffered from many of the same issues as the similar Dictabelt audio recording system, such as relatively rapid wear and degradation (stiffening) of the plastic, it was mostly the lack of interest from the audio labels that killed the format. With the big labels and thus big artists heavily invested in records, the Tefifon never really got any hits and saw little use outside of West Germany throughout the 1950s and 1960s before its last factories were shuttered.

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Picture By Paper Tape

August 26, 2025 by Al Williams 14 Comments

The April 1926 issue of “Science and Invention” had a fascinating graphic. It explained, for the curious, how a photo of a rescue at sea could be in the New York papers almost immediately. It was the modern miracle of the wire photo. But how did the picture get from Plymouth, England, to New York so quickly? Today, that’s no big deal, but set your wayback machine to a century ago.

Of course, the answer is analog fax. But think about it. How would you create an analog fax machine in 1926? The graphic is quite telling. (Click on it to enlarge, you won’t be disappointed.)

If you are like us, when you first saw it you thought: “Oh, sure, paper tape.” But a little more reflection makes you realize that solves nothing. How do you actually scan the photo onto the paper tape, and how can you reconstitute it on the other side? The paper tape is clearly digital, right? How do you do an analog-to-digital converter in 1926? Continue reading “Picture By Paper Tape” →

Radio Apocalypse: America’s Doomsday Rocket Radios

August 25, 2025 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

Even in the early days of the Cold War, it quickly became apparent that simply having hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weapons would never be a sufficient deterrent to atomic attack. For nuclear weapons to be anything other than expensive ornaments, they have to be part of an engineered system that guarantees that they’ll work when they’re called upon to do so, and only then. And more importantly, your adversaries need to know that you’ve made every effort to make sure they go boom, and that they can’t interfere with that process.

In practical terms, nuclear deterrence is all about redundancy. There can be no single point of failure anywhere along the nuclear chain of command, and every system has to have a backup with multiple backups. That’s true inside every component of the system, from the warheads that form the sharp point of the spear to the systems that control and command those weapons, and especially in the systems that relay the orders that will send the missiles and bombers on their way.

When the fateful decision to push the button is made, Cold War planners had to ensure that the message got through. Even though they had a continent-wide system of radios and telephone lines that stitched together every missile launch facility and bomber base at their disposal, planners knew how fragile all that infrastructure could be, especially during a nuclear exchange. When the message absolutely, positively has to get through, you need a way to get above all that destruction, and so they came up with the Emergency Rocket Communication System, or ERCS.

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The Terminal Demise Of Consumer Electronics Through Subscription Services

August 18, 2025 by Maya Posch 86 Comments

Open any consumer electronics catalog from around the 1980s to the early 2000s and you are overwhelmed by a smörgåsbord of devices, covering any audio-visual and similar entertainment and hobby needs one might have. Depending on the era you can find the camcorders, point-and-shoot film and digital cameras right next to portable music players, cellphones, HiFi sets and tower components, televisions and devices like DVD players and VCRs, all of them in a dizzying amount of brands, shapes and colors that are sure to fit anyone’s needs, desires and budget.

When by the late 2000s cellphones began to absorb more and more of the features of these devices alongside much improved cellular Internet access, these newly minted ‘smartphones’ were hailed as a technological revolution that combined so many consumer electronics into a single device. Unlike the relatively niche feature phones, smartphones absolutely took off.

Fast-forward more than a decade and the same catalogs now feature black rectangles identified respectively as smart phones, smart TVs and tablets, alongside evenly colored geometric shapes that identify as smart speakers and other devices. While previously the onus for this change was laid by this author primarily on the death of industrial design, the elephant in the room would seem to be that consumer electronics are suffering from a terminal disease: subscription services.

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The World’s First Podcaster?

August 13, 2025 by Al Williams 12 Comments

When do you think the first podcast occurred? Did you guess in the 1890s? That’s not a typo. Telefonhírmondó was possibly the world’s first true “telephone newspaper.” People in Budapest could dial a phone number and listen to what we would think of now as radio content. Surprisingly, the service lasted until 1944, although after 1925, it was rebroadcasting a radio station’s programming.

Tivadar Puskás, the founder of Budapest’s “Telephone Newspaper” (public domain)

The whole thing was the brainchild of Tivadar Puskás, an engineer who had worked with Thomas Edison. At first, the service had about 60 subscribers, but Puskás envisioned the service one day spanning the globe. Of course, he wasn’t wrong. There was a market for worldwide audio programs, but they were not going to travel over phone lines to the customer.

The Hungarian government kept tight control over newspapers in those days. However, as we see in modern times, new media often slips through the cracks. After two weeks of proving the concept out, Puskás asked for formal approval and for a 50-year exclusive franchise for the city of Budapest. They would eventually approve the former, but not the latter.

Unfortunately, a month into the new venture, Puskás died. His brother Albert took over and continued talks with the government. The phone company wanted a piece of the action, as did the government. Before anything was settled, Albert sold the company to István Popper. He finalized the deal, which included rules requiring signed copies of the news reports to be sent to the police three times a day. The affair must have been lucrative. The company would eventually construct its own telephone network independent of the normal phone system. By 1907, they boasted 15,000 subscribers, including notable politicians and businesses, including hotels. Continue reading “The World’s First Podcaster?” →