I subscribe to the puzzler.
New puzzler about Bill Lear, I guessed correctly, I won’t give away the answer, so no spoiler alert. But, they did provide the wrong decade, should be sixties.
I recall the Bill Lear puzzler from before. It’s definitely a good one. From among the recent Best of Car Talk podcasts, I enjoyed “the tricky king” puzzler the most.
The one about the mystery fuse was pretty good too. I doubt I’d have ever figured that one out.
What was the puzzler? What man made jet airplanes and sporty car seats?
And lets not forget the 8 track tape.
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Bill Lear did 8 tracks? The guy had a wide ranging set of skills!
He invented it along with a team from Ampex.
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And, Earl “madman” Muntz invented the 4 track predecessor of the 8 track.
You missed me saying I wasn’t going to provide the answer, but yes, 8 track tapes.
That’s why I said wrong decade, designed in 1964. A friend, in ‘66, went to a local store that sold&installed players, bartered his labor installing the players for one day in exchange for a free player.
However, we will have to wait until next week for their answer.
Reminds me, 1970’s, one of my high school friends purchased a vw bug for his firsrt car, and proud as punch about it, the first “improvment”, he installed a 4-track. I suggested he should assess the ability to purchase 4-track tapes of his favorite bands first, b/c I had heard they were in short supply, most studios offering only 8-tracks. He of course ignored me & went ahead with this idea anyway, then later bemoaned to anybody who would listen that while the 4-track was actually better format , he couldn’t find the tapes he wanted in 4 track … lol … I didn’t envy his 4 track, but I did envy his cool VW.
Reminds me of Betavs VHS. Beta was the far far supurior media but VHS won the war anyhow
VHS won, as I recall, is because Sony would not license the format to other manufacturers. Whereas, four tracks had a cheaper initial cost, but less support in prerecorded material.
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Or more current - 4k is by far the best video and sound quality for watching movies. And it’s almost nonexistence due to online streaming now. Soon blue-ray discs will disappear. Some recently released movies you can’t even get in any type of format except on-line. People chose convenient over quality. Streaming quality has gotten better, but it still lags behind a good quality Blue-ray or 4k. I recently watched Avatar on one of the streaming services. Halfway through I decided to stop and put in my Blue-ray disc. The difference was night and day. I was using my streaming service through my Blue-Ray player.
Conclusion - Just because it’s the best doesn’t mean people will always buy it.
Our cable provider streams content in 4k UHD and HDR. All the major streaming services are supported (Netflix, Prime, etc). Where 4k is not native, like broadcast TV, they upconvert many of those to 4k. Not as good as native 4k but still better than HD.
Here’s the best part- within my house, the distribution is via wireless router. I don’t need any cable running inside the house…nice because we have 6 rooms running 4k UHD TV.
So does ours. I’m no knocking the 4k streaming service I get. But there is a quality difference between the even my Blue-Ray disc and 4k streaming. But you have to do a side-side comparison to even notice it. It really shows in sound quality. If you’re watching “Mrs. Doubtfire” it doesn’t matter what format you use. You’ll never see or hear any difference. But a movie with Avatar with the special effects or Wicked with its soundtrack and special effects. There are differences. Does it really matter? Not really. The quality in streaming is still EXCELLENT.
Especially if you compare to even a decade ago let alone before digital transmission. We can still get some of the original broadcast stations over cable and the resolution is terrible by today’s standards.
Yeah, films like Avatar and similar are the real test of image quality. Although I seem to become comfortable with the screen size pretty quick, I am still in awe of the image quality today. I still remember having just a 15" or so black and white TV as kids.
What gets me is the games they play at the stores. Look at any of the higher end sets and they are showing pictures in 8k that look absolutely astounding. Trouble is, there is nothing to really take advantage of that spectacular capability.
I remember our first HD set. It was a Sony tube set that weighed so much I had to use the Egyptian method to get it up onto a reinforced shelf I made for it. Try mounting that on a wall! Plus, just by virtue of the tube limitations, a 40" TV was about it. I have an 85" 4k UHD TV on the wall I can lift by myself. And the resolution is astounding. Plus tubes had mercury in them…
Eventually I’ll get a new TV. But my 10yo LED/LCD TV is fine. My middle son owns an OLED TV. Quality of that TV is heads and tails above my 10yo Samsung.
I had to use a dolly to take my old 35” TV to my truck and take it to the recycling center. I was able to carry my 65” Samsung into the house one handed.
Remember when you had to call your friends to help you move a TV because it was so heavy?
On a related note, in the early 90s, we had PictureTel come to give us (at Digital Equip Corp) a demonstration on how they could transmit video electronically. Even though the quality was just “OK”, we were all amazed.
I remember them telling us they require 13 dedicated parallel phone connections to pump the data through.
I used to work for DEC and one of my consulting jobs after I left DEC was to PictureTel in Andover MA. PictureTel shot themselves in the foot. They’re system was excellent, but they refused to look at anything but their large expensive system even when you could get a solution like Microsoft NetMeeting at 1/100th the cost and provide 80% of PictureTel’s large system.
Bandwidth wasn’t like it is now. Those were probably using multiplexed 2400 or 4800 baud modems. Back in the 80’s I saw a company’s IBM mainframe (3090 system) communicate with satellite company’s IBM Series 1 or even smaller 370 system via up to 30 dedicated multiplexed phone lines.