Yes, I have been working with vintage computers a bit, and by extension, vintage television technology for the sake of using it as a display. This question has come up several times in my mind. Why isn’t vintage television technology valued the same way vintage computers are valued? I think it comes down to how much real work most people got done out of the old technology. What is most surprising is that intage computers, despite there not being as massive of a market for them, seem to be a lot more abundantly available than vintage televisions. By all means, it is definitely a difference in attitude.
A lot of innovation has happened in the computers, and they have drastically shaped the world as we know it today. But it is also true that the innovation television technology, though slower, has also drastically shaped the world as we know it today, so really, why aren’t they valued as much? When you really pry and prod apart at this a lot, yes, the answer is clear, it is the differences in the attitudes of the people behind the tech that is what matters, not merely the abundance of the tech itself at the time when the technology was prime in current manufacturing production and commercial sales.
The average television watching person, at the time, was doing so as a means of being a tremendous time waster. In retrospect, they take no interest in their past of being a tremendous time waster. Additionally, they are a tremendous money water. They have a tendency to throw away working tech and buy new stuff just because they personally are too disorganized. They rely on paying other people to keep their stores organized, but the moment they make a purchase, unpack, throw away labels, tags, and boxes, they’ve essentially dropped the merchandise down into an environment which is a one-way ticket to the trash. Everything that goes into such a messy and disorganized environment, the inherently sloppy person only responds by randomly throwing everything into the trash. Of course they’re not going to self-organize, that someone else’s responsibility! And once they’ve thrown away things that they really do need, that’s how the cycle starts over again.
Ultimately, the mindless consumer really lacks any memory of the past, and when the primary goal is to seek entertainment, they don’t really marvel in the technology itself used to deliver the entertainment. Hence the relative lack of interest in vintage TV tech.
Now, let’s compare the vintage computing community. These are people who worked, at the time, in highly complex environments. Writing computer software is no joke, you’ve got to be really organized, every memory allocation must be matched by a memory free, lest you spawn memory leaks that cripple your system to a halt. These people also develop an intimate understanding of the machine’s technology itself. You’re talking an entirely different crowd of people even when they were at their prime time in the present. In hindsight, when what’s modern becomes vintage, these people are probably going to also be much better off financially since their degree of organization probably extends throughout their entire lifestyle, and likewise they are much more organized in how they deal with their old computers, selling them rather than junking them.
So, there you go. Time wasters of the past will waste time in the future, and time savers of the past will just keep going. They don’t stop early. Okay, that’s about as much as I can say about the subject, and hopefully you can get the idea.