mabfan | Our Television Sets: A History

Today is the end of an era. Today,

gnomi and I finally stopped using a CRT (cathode ray tube) television set.

You see that TV in the picture? Nomi and I have been using that TV set since 1996. It's a 17-inch Sony television set, and in 1996 it was state of the art. But yesterday, I put it out with the trash. I'll miss it in some ways, so I felt compelled to take the picture. It served us well over 18 years, but now it's time to move on.

Our first TV set was actually one I purchased as a freshman in college. A German graduate student in Chemistry was going back to Germany, and he had to get rid of his TV set. He sold it to me for a low price, and I kept it all through college and graduate school. I was the only one among my college friends who had a TV. I still remember friends gathering in our dorm room to watch The Simpsons when it was a new show, being shown on Thursday nights.

When I left the Boston area for two years, I left the TV in Nomi's custody to use and watch. When we got married in 1995, we kept using that same TV. Then, in 1996, we were watching a VHS videotape of "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm," and the picture on the set began to shrink at the top and the bottom. At first Nomi thought it might be odd letter boxing, but then we smelled burning plastic. We turned off the TV, unplugged it, and put it out in the trash with a sign on it saying it was broken. It was scavenged within the hour.

Our friend

530nm330hz drove us around to buy a new TV, and we ended up with the Sony 17-inch one pictured above. Over the years, as TV technology has progressed, I've wanted to purchase a larger, better TV set, but by the time we were ready we simply didn't have the money.

Then, last week, someone in Brookline who was moving emailed a mailing list we were on, saying he needed to sell a 42-inch LED TV that he had bought six months ago, and he was asking for less than half the original purchase price. (And it was a Sony!) I responded immediately, and so as of last Thursday we had a nice, new, larger TV set in our living room. The kids cried about still wanting the old TV at first, but they soon got used to the better TV we now have.

I offered our old CRT on the same mailing list, but no one wanted it. I put it out with the trash, and no one trash-picked it. It looks like the era of CRT television really has come to an end.

Goodbye, old TV. You did good.