Your comment made me think of a personal anecdote. File it under "Why I love living in Silicon Valley".
Our neighborhood blocked off the street for a Fourth of July picnic a few years ago. Sitting in a lawn chair talking to a long-retired neighbor over a beer, we got to talking about old analog TV standards. (We are both hams, so conversation tended to turn to radio-ish things.)
I remarked about how clever I thought it was mixing the video carrier and audio subcarrier to get the audio IF. And he says:
"Oh, it wasn't always like that. When I was a kid, there was a TV station in Philadelphia that transmitted 2 1/2 hours two nights a week. They taped up the schematics for a receiver inside a big picture window at their station, and we would all go down with notebooks and copy down the latest changes so that we could update our receivers. The audio subcarrier went through a lot of changes. AM, FM, and they moved the frequency around."
So... I realized that here was a guy who was watching television back when the way you got a TV receiver was to build it from scratch yourself. Wow number 1.
I said: "I suppose when the war came along you were sent to radar school like almost everybody else that worked on television?"
Answer: "No. Did you ever hear of Eckert and Mauchly?"
If you don't already know about it, you might be interested in "From Dits to Bits", the autobiography of Herman Lukoff, an engineer who worked with Eckert and Mauchly.
While not in Silicon Valley, but the other Valley down in Burbank, I had a similar conversation. I was introduced to this person as we had a common interest in the proper methods of 24fps->29.97fps->23.976 video conversions. He told me of the summer he and his brother created a new method to replace the old school flying spot scanning technique that was common at the time. The new process included the ability of one of the first video noise removal capabilities. The coolest part of the story to me was that the first TV broadcast from the moon was sent through the bit of equipment he had built before being broadcast to the public.
The lunar TV system was fascinating in itself - narrow bandwidth forced the use of "slow scan" at about 10Hz. The conversion was done by having a long retention phospor TV and ... pointing a regular TV camera at it.
Our neighborhood blocked off the street for a Fourth of July picnic a few years ago. Sitting in a lawn chair talking to a long-retired neighbor over a beer, we got to talking about old analog TV standards. (We are both hams, so conversation tended to turn to radio-ish things.)
I remarked about how clever I thought it was mixing the video carrier and audio subcarrier to get the audio IF. And he says:
"Oh, it wasn't always like that. When I was a kid, there was a TV station in Philadelphia that transmitted 2 1/2 hours two nights a week. They taped up the schematics for a receiver inside a big picture window at their station, and we would all go down with notebooks and copy down the latest changes so that we could update our receivers. The audio subcarrier went through a lot of changes. AM, FM, and they moved the frequency around."
So... I realized that here was a guy who was watching television back when the way you got a TV receiver was to build it from scratch yourself. Wow number 1.
I said: "I suppose when the war came along you were sent to radar school like almost everybody else that worked on television?"
Answer: "No. Did you ever hear of Eckert and Mauchly?"
Me: stunned.