TV Controls

 I was having fun with my camera when a kid form our church borrowed and tried to look at the pictures by touching the screen; he thought that my camera was a touch screen camera but it was not. Anyway, got me thinking and got me nostalgic about controls especially TV control which I think was the paradigms for designing control interface for devices...or whatever.

I spent my childhood with dial controls. We used to have a vacuum tube cabinet type Zenith television and all the controls used dials.  To change channels, a dial was turned.  The on/off control was also dial, and so was the vertical and horizontal controls; everything was controlled by turning knobs and switches.

Not our TV. I remember the horizontal and the vertical and horizontal control was located at the back panel.  In retrospect, the sound these old tvs made when turned on and turned off was horrifying by today's standards.Also, the static created by the crt was so powerful that they could literally make the viewers, when near enough, hair stand on its end.

When I was small, I used tot think that any house that had a telephone was owned by a very rich resident.  I think I may have used this kind of telephone maybe three to four times because it was a sort of a technological novelty especially for a child like me.

Then after a few years, the push buttons came. Everything then was push button. In fact, when our neighbor’s new TV arrived, we were there to witness how this push button control thing worked. It was quite a change because the TV controls had no dials. There were buttons for each channel, which during those years, numbered around four or five TV stations. Also the antenna was indoor and that meant no climbing up on the roof to rotate the aerial to look for better reception. 

No dials, just buttons. A church member had one of this. We used to watch betamax tapes on this TV. No more fine tuning dials...

Of course the next stage was the remote control. ( Then there was the rotary something called the click-wheel made famous by the  Apple IPods for the personal devices.) 

And then it was the touch screen but now some TV are responding to gestures...

I mean, even Spock didn't anticipate this. Hmmm...what's next?