[*] I get a number of questions at the office when my wallpaper changer
> pops up with the original WDSU-TV test pattern. It makes me feel old when
> I turn out to be the only person there who remembers when test patterns
> were routinely incorporated into the station ID slides ...
Any chance of a copy of that? It would be interesting to see.
You can find many examples of old (and not-so-old) test patterns and idents for British TV here:
formatting link
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I seem to recall when I was about five
> years old my parents had a television set with a tiny little screen
> which was maybe two or three inches round. And it had a _huge_
> magnifying glass attached to the front of it. PAT]
I never saw it, but my father built a set in the late 1940s/early 1950s using a VCR97 tube, which, if I recall correctly, was about 5 inches.
The VCR97 had been a very common CRT in radar sets and was available cheaply as government surplus at the time. Of course, the resulting monochrome picture would have been green!
- Paul.