Less the vertical blanking interval! I remember studying how NTSC color worked; some clever tricks getting color information in the same bandwidth as B&W.
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Dark days!
Folk still recite the vestigial āpā after hardware resolutions, hoping to ward off thar ancient evil; interlacing
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Donāt worry, sheāll grow up someday and realize thereās a lot of amazing art created before 1938 or so.
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the truth of this is obvious now that you say it. the FCC rules allow each channel to be split into 9 video streams and something like 20 additional audio streams. my local cheapo network 32 WANN e.g. has maxed all of these and the reception on them is always low res and the ālego effectā with any sort of movement. but the channels that are between 1 and 3 video steams (nobody else even bothers with audio) are pretty solid usually.
Never Twice Same Color. Years ago I was working on a military project which had an early CCD camera. The output was NTSC and there was no way we could get back to the color channels to get reliable output. The efforts I went toā¦
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When I was young, lo those many years ago, black and white television was quite literally free. Free but for the juice to run it.
To acquire a black and white television set, one would simply walk to the corner of an intersection in an urban area and remove one from the stack. Youād take it home and give it a test run. If it worked, you watched it. If it didnāt work, it became fodder for industrial-themed art projects such as might occupy a gothic dive bar.
There was a time when vinyl and turntables were nearly free. This is exactly the process of how something dated becomes fashionable once more. Eventually, the rubes pay actual money to enjoy the lifestyles of those who have no other option.
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We have one. How else are we supposed to use our DVD player or watch Netflix?
Wait, are they saying people still watch broadcast television? How quaint!
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With the new tiny media servers like chromecast and now the steam streaming box I have been really tempted to start a savings fund for a huge screen.
Until Ceefax ceased operations. There isnāt much point, now.
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The old stuff gets expensive to maintain, and so it becomes a status symbol. Vintage cars, steam train driving, owning a Dutch barge rather than a modern fibreglass boat, solid fuel powered kitchen ranges and the like are very definitely conspicious consumption. A vinyl collection and a turntable costs a lot more than an iPhone and those records wear out.
Butā¦the other day I was asked if I could put some MP3s onto old style cassette tape, for language teaching. The fact is, that cassette tape with its numerical indicator and simple controls is much easier to use to play the same piece over and over than is a phone or tablet with displays that blank out and the need to use time rather than a simple 0-999 index.
Then I found out how much a decent working Marantz recorder would cost, and decided it wasnāt cost effective.
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OT, but that reminded me that I didnāt see The Wizard of Oz in color until I was an adult. Things made a lot more sense at that point; the horse of a different color, for example. I didnāt even know that I didnāt know! It was quite the revelation.
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Wellā¦ Itās not 100% vestigial just yet - there are still TV networks that broadcast in 1080i these days.
Also - can I just add how confused I was when I moved from Canada to Ireland, and found out that there was a tax on people just for owning a TV? I was flabbergasted.
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480i to be both correct and precise. The total frame is 525 lines, but only 480 or so are displayed. The number of blanked lines at the top of the screen changed over the decades as more stuff was encoded into them.
Hereās the waveform, from my 1949 Video Hand Book:
This is USA TV, of course. Scottish TVs had either 405 lines or 625 lines, depending on the year. But I know little more about that subject, as Iām not a British subject.
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0.02% of scottish households have a black and white tv. Probably a similar number to the number of households with squirrel fur shotgun cosies. Or telescopic mayonaise supersoakers.
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A pleasure to be corrected so thoroughly 
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I meant hardware resolutions (phone, tablet, monitor) and will correct my post.
Yeah, unfortunately ādigitalā cuts both ways: technically speaking, it provides better results per unit bandwidth(even without MP4) than analog standards do; but it was also the first chance in 50-odd years for broadcasters to screw things up; and boy have they ever obliged.
Had they been content to get the same number of channels as before, things probably would have been fine. Since they were promised zOMG extra chennels! as part of the cajoling to get people behind the plan, though, results have definitely gotten worse in some areas of marginal coverage. Analog wasnāt elegant; but the basic outlines of spectrum use were laid out sometime between the first and second Trilobite Wars, so weāve had decades of near-stasis on the broadcast side and continual improvement on the receiver side; which certainly made analog performance look a lot better.
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so you got the joke then?
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Iāll take quaint and backwards.
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Easy as A, B, C, D,E 
I only understand analog when it comes to soundāwhat are the front and back porches used for?
