That Philco Predicta looks really neat! It actually reminds me of my favorite iMac design, the “sunflower” or “table lamp” G4 one. There is something a little annoying about trying to do interior...
That Philco Predicta looks really neat! It actually reminds me of my favorite iMac design, the “sunflower” or “table lamp” G4 one.
There is something a little annoying about trying to do interior design with modern flat screens. They’re just so big you can’t help but have to build an entire room around them. Older house living rooms can’t even easily accommodate them.
I’ve often contemplated a concept of a rear projection TV where it’s normally kind of small and a piece of furniture, but when you want to have a home cinema experience you flick a switch and it, instead, projects back to a big screen when you feel like reconfiguring your whole living room to watch a movie.
I have a Predicta, recently fully restored. They are very cool, but the plastic over the screen is decomposing and it makes the whole room smell like vomit (really). It came from an era when...
I have a Predicta, recently fully restored. They are very cool, but the plastic over the screen is decomposing and it makes the whole room smell like vomit (really).
It came from an era when industrial design of TVs really started to get daring and creative. After a decade of dull mahogany cubes, new plastics and other materials granted a whole lot of freedom to try new things. The Philco Predicta debuted in 1959, and alongside were sets from Sylvania like the Halolight series and the Dualette, the GE Forecaster. It was a design golden age. Before too long, everything was generic black plastic.
Is it possible to replace that plastic? It seems to be such a shame to have a working version of that, but then have it just smell bad
I have a Predicta, recently fully restored. They are very cool, but the plastic over the screen is decomposing and it makes the whole room smell like vomit (really).
Is it possible to replace that plastic? It seems to be such a shame to have a working version of that, but then have it just smell bad
When I was little we had a big RCA wooden box tv on the floor. My parents had bought it from a furniture store. There were about 5 channels and we had to get up off the couch to change them....
When I was little we had a big RCA wooden box tv on the floor. My parents had bought it from a furniture store. There were about 5 channels and we had to get up off the couch to change them. Sometimes it would stop working properly. Everything would be dark or green or staticky. So a tv repairman would come to the house and move it away from the wall and replace tubes or something. After he left I would look into the open back of the tv and see the big picture tube and the other little glowing tubes and it was kind of magical.
When watching my cartoons on channel 5, sometimes the picture would scramble and I could hear someone talking loudly. I found out that one of my neighbors had a CB radio with a big antenna.
Other times the tv would go dark again but you could temporarily fix it by getting up and smacking the side.
Once the tuner dial broke off so we changed channels with pliers that we left on the top of the set.
When this tv stopped working my parents bought a smaller “portable” tv and set it on top of the now dead “furniture” TV. We had it like that for years.
Later when home computers became popular, everyone had monitors on desks and they took up most of the desk because of the cathode ray tube. I remember seeing rows of desks in offices where these monitors dominated the room with all that unusable space. I eventually had one on my desk. It would get dark sometimes so I would smack it on the side and it would get brighter for a while.
I think it’s interesting when people (especially retro gamers) get nostalgic for old TVs. Because CRTs kind of sucked. It’s such a luxury ow to just have a big slab of glass (or plastic) that takes up no unnecessary room and doesn’t need to be smacked and doesn’t get radio interference and doesn’t weigh 409 pounds.
Would have loved to read more of this, a shame that the "100 years of television design" on display only reach from 1920 to 1970.
Tell me about it! For 100 years we got 3 examples! Not even one per decade. :-(
And one country!
That Philco Predicta looks really neat! It actually reminds me of my favorite iMac design, the “sunflower” or “table lamp” G4 one.
There is something a little annoying about trying to do interior design with modern flat screens. They’re just so big you can’t help but have to build an entire room around them. Older house living rooms can’t even easily accommodate them.
I’ve often contemplated a concept of a rear projection TV where it’s normally kind of small and a piece of furniture, but when you want to have a home cinema experience you flick a switch and it, instead, projects back to a big screen when you feel like reconfiguring your whole living room to watch a movie.
I have a Predicta, recently fully restored. They are very cool, but the plastic over the screen is decomposing and it makes the whole room smell like vomit (really).
It came from an era when industrial design of TVs really started to get daring and creative. After a decade of dull mahogany cubes, new plastics and other materials granted a whole lot of freedom to try new things. The Philco Predicta debuted in 1959, and alongside were sets from Sylvania like the Halolight series and the Dualette, the GE Forecaster. It was a design golden age. Before too long, everything was generic black plastic.
Is it possible to replace that plastic? It seems to be such a shame to have a working version of that, but then have it just smell bad
When I was little we had a big RCA wooden box tv on the floor. My parents had bought it from a furniture store. There were about 5 channels and we had to get up off the couch to change them. Sometimes it would stop working properly. Everything would be dark or green or staticky. So a tv repairman would come to the house and move it away from the wall and replace tubes or something. After he left I would look into the open back of the tv and see the big picture tube and the other little glowing tubes and it was kind of magical.
When watching my cartoons on channel 5, sometimes the picture would scramble and I could hear someone talking loudly. I found out that one of my neighbors had a CB radio with a big antenna.
Other times the tv would go dark again but you could temporarily fix it by getting up and smacking the side.
Once the tuner dial broke off so we changed channels with pliers that we left on the top of the set.
When this tv stopped working my parents bought a smaller “portable” tv and set it on top of the now dead “furniture” TV. We had it like that for years.
Later when home computers became popular, everyone had monitors on desks and they took up most of the desk because of the cathode ray tube. I remember seeing rows of desks in offices where these monitors dominated the room with all that unusable space. I eventually had one on my desk. It would get dark sometimes so I would smack it on the side and it would get brighter for a while.
I think it’s interesting when people (especially retro gamers) get nostalgic for old TVs. Because CRTs kind of sucked. It’s such a luxury ow to just have a big slab of glass (or plastic) that takes up no unnecessary room and doesn’t need to be smacked and doesn’t get radio interference and doesn’t weigh 409 pounds.