What's a Vader?

[AtariLover!]

We had a similar TV only it was a Zenith (are they still in business?) , 25 inches surrounded by wood and almost big as a couch!

I am unsure but I THINK they made them that way so that they could charge more for them.

If I remember correctly when my folks bought the Zenith in '77 it cost around $700 or so which is ridiculous as you can buy a new 25 incher for around $300 nowadays.

WP

I had one, too. It was an RCA fine-tuning programmable color television from 1982. It was 25". The reason I don't have it anymore is because I sold it for $15 at our garage sale. I just love to talk about electronics (especially old ones), so when I saw this post, I just had to reply! I also had an old stereophonic ZENITH 25" tv. But when I got it, it was dead, except for a buzzing sound it made. I also have a ZENITH television with tubes (the glass things that light up and get really hot, and no, I don't mean light bulbs!) But it is small, only 11" (Off topic TWICE!). and yeah, it works!

Edited August 26, 2006 by AtariLover!

[2600lover]

lol

[Dave Farquhar]

I don't know about the plastic thing. Was plastic really still considered cheap and flimsy by 1977? I mean, certainly from its inception in the 60's into the early 70's maybe, but by 77, I can't imagine plastic hadn't been pretty much accepted as what some consumer goods were made of.

 

If you look at the 2600, especially the Heavy sixer you can see it used the same metal buttons that big 8 tracks Stereos used at the time. Also it is heavy and metalic, but covered in plastic, which would have been the same as the Phones o the time. So i don't think it would have bothered anyone that it was made of plastic, so to speak.

 

-Ray

 

Plastic was revolutionary, hip, and high-tech in the '50s when you started to see it (the leading brand of accessory for Lionel and American Flyer trains was "Plasticville," celebrating the material it was made of). When you look at the early transistor radios, there was no attempt to disguise what they were made of at all--it was smooth and marbled. By the end of the decade (and absolutely by the late '60s), its coolness factor had worn off. Remember in The Graduate, what the boring parents and their friends wanted him to get into? Plastics. It's not so much necessarily that plastic was considered flimsy and cheap, just ordinary.

 

There may not have been a lot of market research that went into the 2600's design, but its design evolution pretty well reflected the design trends of the time, from the boxy woodgrain sixers up to the sleek jr.