You might have trouble getting such a rig up to 88 MPH. ;)

Back around 1983 at the old Smirnoff Labs there was talk of RCA getting into home computers. But this was after several other players had the market, and IBM had come out with their PC. RCA abandoned the idea when they realized that they would do little more than say "Me too"... I knew some guys in a group that was looking at the existing home computers of the day, the Commodures and Atari 800s, and I remember when the Coleco Adam came in, what a POS that was... We all liked the Atari 800 the best.

When my wife was in college in the early 70s they were using an RCA computer to process programs they wrote. She joked that they could load the data into the machine, then go out for lunch or dinner, and when they came back, it still wasn't done. Just a joke, but she said the machine was VERY slow. :boring:

RCA & Zenith PISSED AWAY leadership in electronics as much as the Japs swiped it from them...They started listening to Cost Accountants, Brand Managers, other forms of "Business" vermin who convinced them the road to Nirvana was selling to the lowest common denominator..I remember when I was 12-13 or so, about 1969-70, & I was seeing RCAs & Zeniths in "Cut-Rate" stores- All-Mart, Rose's, S.S. Kresge..They started selling "Consuls" w/plastic fronts, vinyl woodgrain over fiberboard...You NEVER saw a Sony or Panasonic down there w/the "Dogs & Cats" like that..They did it to THEMSELVES as much as anything...

Really Sandy? You know because you were in those boardrooms right? You must have at least read that book I mentioned... No? So when Zenith won an Emmy for MTS stereo in the 80s, that was because they were "down there with the dogs and cats"? At least there were never any Panasonic or Sony's with "simulated woodgrain finishes". Oh wait, I HAVE a Sony with a sticker that actually says that. And those '69 shareholder reports that show Zenith working with laser and plasma flat displays were just lies. Zenith's work in the Grand Alliance HDTV standard didn't occur because you noticed those economy 23" metal cabinet sets they pretty much made just for a presense in K-mart... America's number one retailer at the time.

Anyway, I'm not going to waste time telling you what you don't know. I'd just like to know why you always have to chime in with your folksy, nostalgic BS? It's like listening to your know-it-all uncle drone on about the "gubbbernment", but he can't tell you the state capital. You really don't know what you're talking about, but it never slows you down does it?

Maybe not, Carmine, but when RCA/Zenith quit supporting their "Premium" type dealers, they started to DIE..It may not have really mattered in the long run, but I would like to think it DID matter..

Simply having a strong trade policy would have kept them off our shores. Problem was and always will be, there's not a politician on either side of the aisle that can't be bribed...

RCA could have cornered the market with flat screens, at least for a decade or so. They invented the LCD display, owned the first Patents, (1967) but they did not have the vision to see the potential. They did not want them to compete with their CRT's. They were drunk with years of success with their CRT sets and had no interest in investing more R&D. They had a team of engineers on the LCD project all begging the top brass at RCA to go further to no avail.

I serviced RCA and Zenith warranties for several years. First, for me, RCA started simply sending me complete replacement chassis starting with the CTC-175's and up, and often, these chassis didn't even work straight out of the box. THEN, suddenly, RCA informed me that from then on, I'd be replacing to the component level. Most of their problems were due to that stupid tuner design that had B+, etc, going through solder connections on the tuner!! I used silver solder, and used individual copper wires to repair the tuners, and rarely had one come back again. It took me longer to repair, so the customer was the one that got stuck.

When Zenith stopped sending modules, and started repairing to component levels, I decided it was time to get out of the repair business, as Zenith quality had gone south even more than RCA had. Even before they stopped sending modules, I had many cases where the modules Zenith sent were actually DOA, and were missing parts! Often, I'd have to move parts from the old module over to the new one to get it working. And NO, I didn't get paid extra for this. I got X dollars PER job.

Both companies got lazy and their products were no better than anyone else anymore. I think all they wanted was to make the sale, have the set make it through the warranty period, then buy another one when it dies, rather than pay to have it fixed. Sound familiar? :scratch2:

Please don't interpert my comments as a defense of Zenith quality once in their death spiral. My remarks were intended for an accurate depiction of David Sarnoff and encourage people to learn his real motivations while at RCA. These are excerpts from a chapter in a larger book I'm working on that will deal with trade policy and manufacturing. It's very time consuming to write, because I refuse to use some of these statements unless they can be footnoted.

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"Many will no doubt wonder why American manufacturers don't speak up more stridently; if in fact they are being so disadvantaged by imports and their exclusion from foreign markets. It's possible that they may have looked at the outcome for Zenith Radio Corporation, which did choose legal remedies, pleading (and suing) for the enforcement of internationally recognized anti-dumping laws, anti-monopoly laws and prosecution for U.S. Customs fraud; only to be repeatedly undermined by involvement from our own State Department and Justice Department. The waters of international law enforcement get very murky when politics are involved. Zenith demonstrably resisted the temptation to off-shore its manufacturing, research and development for decades after its competitors had moved their manufacturing to Asia, or closed their doors altogether. By the early 1990s, this industry-leader was reduced to a shell of its former self..."

"At this point, I must mention Zenith's biggest competitor of the era, the Radio Corporation of America. Ironically during the first years of its existence, RCA didn't manufacture a single radio. Some of the first multi-national corporations; General Electric, Westinghouse and AT&T, held almost complete monopolies on patents in the fields of electrical power generation, lighting, telephone and radio manufacturing, and through interlocking foreign patent pools, divided the world into territorial monopolies. The executives of these companies came of age as J.D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company was broken up under the Sherman anti-trust act, at the start of the century. Thus they quietly engineered so-called consent decrees (which are not admissions of guilt) in response to charges of price-fixing. The result of one of these consent decrees was the 1919 managed break-up of the GE/Westinghouse patent pool and creation of the Radio Corporation of America..."

"After WWII, Zenith was at the height of success and finally in a position to challenge David Sarnoff's Radio Corporation of America not only in sales, but in court by refusing to renew a byzantine package of patent licenses. Zenith's legendary founder, "Commander" Eugene McDonald was a fighter, and was willing to risk his company to declare war on RCA's patent racket. In reality this package of licenses was "protection-money" that a radio manufacturer either paid for, or faced the wrath of RCA lawyers in court. Licensing fees accounted for an enormous percentage of RCA's annual revenues. The power of RCA's world-wide patent monopoly was not in the strength of any particular innovation, but the threat of expensive, crippling litigation. Zenith had been protected to a certain extent because it had licensed its most important patents from Edwin Armstrong, before he had sold them to Westinghouse..."

"On Sunday evening, September 7, 1957 attorneys representing RCA presented Zenith counsel with a hastily prepared settlement, designed to prevent the opening of a civil litigation trial the following morning. The initial draft gave Zenith a royalty-free license for radio-television manufacture. Other manufacturers had refused to join Zenith's suit, and RCA was not about to give up its patent-pool revenue from other builders without even being challenged. More relevant to our discussion of trade was a $10-million payment made as compensation for the estimated loss in revenue as a result of Zenith's exclusion from the Canadian market..."

"During the course of taking depositions and examining documents from RCA for the European-civil court attempts to open closed markets, it became apparent that David Sarnoff was focusing an inordinate amount of attention on Japan beginning in the mid-1950s. Teams of Japanese researchers and engineers were making regular trips to RCA headquarters, laboratories and factories. At the same time, RCA's patent experts and technical staff were making frequent trips to Japan. As far back as 1921, in a memo dated December of that year, Sarnoff had recommended a "consolidation" of competitors in Japan, modeled on the way RCA had been doing business in the United States. Sarnoff's interest was in the lucrative foreign patent licenses and is plainly revealed in this quote from his memoranda:

"RCA would be glad if such a group in Japan would be its representative in that country and would be pleased to represent the Japanese group in the United States."

Owen D. Young, another Sarnoff mentor at GE during the creation of RCA, followed up with a letter to "Doctor Dan" a Japanese contact, urging them to "stabilize" the electronics industry in Japan and stated:

"I explained to you that we had mobilized in RCA the patents and technical resources of AT&T, Western Electric, United Fruit, Westinghouse and GE and that to make such a mobilization effective all of these concerns have taken a substantial financial interest in RCA."

With RCA's patent licensing scheme finally coming to an end in the U.S. as the result of Zenith's litigation, Sarnoff focused on replacing the lost American licensing revenue with a generous percentage of the revenues of a Japanese cartel which would enjoy a protected consumer market in Japan; while beginning to export successfully to the United States. When GE purchased and reabsorbed RCA in 1985 (largely for the NBC network which it owned), the Japanese licensing agreements were bringing in as much as $200-million in annual income. With amazing speed, Japan was building its electronics industry, and targeting the US market. By 1960, Emperor Hirohito conferred on David Sarnoff the Order of the Rising Sun, the highest decoration that can be awarded to a non-Japanese born person. The Japan Times called him the hero of the Japanese television industry.

"Japan, so often held up as a model of free-market capitalism by many in the U.S., and has never been hampered by concerns over what might be decried as "big-government-central-planning" in America. Japan's notorious Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) took steps to organize its electronics industry along the lines suggested by Sarnoff and the RCA specialists, through the Electronics Industry Development Emergency Law, enacted in 1957. The law outlines the organization, direction and provided financing through the Japanese Development Bank. It's much the same as the turn-of-the-century American trusts, such as Standard Oil, but on an international scale. A first step would be the recognized-as-illegal practice of "dumping" electronic goods. These goods are exported to the United States at a loss, but the loss is countered by high prices in Japan's home market, which is closed to foreign imports."

"Japanese manufacturers had captured the entire U.S. portable radio market with a similar (although less lucrative) dumping scheme. Thus by 1968, facing declining sales and finding no further means of cost reduction, Zenith was forced to end U.S. production of portable transistor radios. They were the last holdout. Zenith executives had seen the handwriting on the wall for the more profitable television market as early as 1960, and reasoned that American competition would lower prices in the Japanese market, thus ending the cartel's ability to endure losses from predatory dumping in the United States. Beginning in 1961, Zenith decided to enter the Japanese market.
Zenith management contacted C. Itoh and Company, a major Japanese trading company for help in distributing Zenith products in Japan, which had proven popular at trade fairs and demonstrations throughout Japan. However, this effort would soon meet with failure as Zenith was met with a virtual firewall of Japanese government protectionism. In a translated letter from C. Itoh, it was explained, "[Ministry of International Trade and Industry] (MITI) would not allocate the currency, because Zenith products are exceedingly popular in the market here."

2/The Fall of the U.S. Consumer Electronics Industry, an American Trade Tragedy, Phillip J. Curtis, pp.110, 111.

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This is Mr. Sarnoff's legacy. Painting Zenith and RCA with the same brush, simply because they were contemporary electronics companies is akin to saying Elvis and Rammstein are both Rock n' Roll acts who've spent time in Germany!

Thank you, Carmine, for posting the excerpt. It "filled in" some holes for me as to the decline and fall of the US consumer electronics industry. :yes:
Kevin

Oh, and, EXCUSE DAPHUCK outta me for having an opinion, & expressing it...I realize that I'm just an old, inbred, ignorant hillbilly PRICK, I'll just keep my goddam trap shut on any of your threads, it obviously INFURIATES you entirely too much...BTW, NASHVILLE is the State Capitol of Tennessee...So there. N'yah, n'yah..

Sounds like the same combination of shortsightedness and hubris that killed Eastman Kodak.

They essentially invented digital photography, back in the 1970s, but the management didn't want it to cannibalize their bread and butter film sales. So they sat on the patents and basically did nothing with them. Once the patents expired, it was too late for Kodak to dominate the industry, and the technology took off and killed the film market anyway. A great video presentation by former Kodak engineer Steve Sasson is available here:

http://vimeo.com/31404047

, which goes into the technical details of the invention, and touches on the piss-poor business decisions that eventually killed the company.

Another reason for the digital 'replacement' of film would be the quality of the laboratory work on the 35mm film went to pot. Towards the end of film in my theatre, I could see the image on the screen bouncing up and down like crazy, and I knew for a fact that it was not a defect in my machines. The film printers were being run so fast that there was no way for the image to stablize as the transfer was being made to the film stock.

Kodak Vision Premier film is probably the best color stock they ever made.

But no, Hollywood spread the word about the flicker free image on digital and acted like film was so old school, even though they had made quality prints for 100 years that won technical awards for the industry.

I'm still watching Kodak die. I truly hate seeing this.

Kodak was always destined for disaster with the digital revolution.

From the very beginning it was "You snap the shutter, we do the rest". In
other words, they were a photofinishing company. They did it, and sold
supplies for others to do it. Film (i.e. camera film) was secondary. They
were never seriously in the camera business. True, they sold cameras, but
except for a peak in the 1930s they never sold many non-toy cameras.
Starting in the 60s they intentionally started making crappy tiny-frame cameras!
Some of the 30s cameras were excellent, but they never tried to sell them
in large numbers. Look around in any tourist site today ... you will see lots and
lots of expensive Nikon and Canon cameras. If there's a strange bird around
you will see lots of big white $3000-7000 lenses too! Today the money is in
cameras and the computers people look at the pictures on, at least mostly.
Hard copies are less common, and many are inkjet.