One of my odder leisure activities is reading old issues of Popular Mechanics, Mechanix [sic] Illustrated, and Popular Science, specifically from the 1950s and 1960s. This was the post-war period when “modern technology” as we know it was being invented, and I often find interesting parallels with today’s world. Of course, the technologies themselves changed immensely, but the attitudes and behaviors that were set up around “high tech” back then still work pretty much the same way.

Take for example the introduction of new TV broadcast formats. Today, we have the ongoing saga of digital TV (“Tomorrow’s TV Today!” — actually more like TV from nine years ago tomorrow) which has generated billions of dollars of revenue for the media telling you which digital TV to buy and the retailers selling them to you. Strangely, the fact that you don’t actually need a new TV to watch digital TV, just a cheap adapter, doesn’t get a lot of play.

Back in the 1960’s the same dynamic applied to the introduction of UHF*. An exciting new world of new channels was opening up (nobody yet knew that UHF would be used mostly for Three Stooges reruns and televangelism) but your suddenly-obsolete TV set couldn’t receive them. Full credit to Popular Mechanics, who not only mentioned that you could retrofit your existing TV, but showed you how in this article:

One major difference between now and 1964 is obvious. Not only did the manufacturer have a UHF conversion kit available, they would send it to you so you could solder it into your TV yourself. Today, manufacturers are a lot less encouraging — indeed, hacking a TV set can be illegal.

* If you’re under 30: the UHF band is channels 14–83, as opposed to the VHF band of 2–13. If you’re under 16: I’m talking about broadcast TV here, which is where video content is delivered using a primitive kind of wireless network to a thing called a “TV set”…oh, never mind.