Who remembers the old tube testers for your TV?

Question

I used to go with my Grandpa to test the tubes in the early 70's.

Answer 1

i remember the colored thing people use to put on thier tv and called it ''colored tv'' LOL...

Answer 2

Sure, I was young back then, but I remember the local Walgreens had a tube tester that looked like a modern video game.

Those vacuum tubes really are dead, the TV picture tube is very different from a vacuum tube and it has no relation to the tubes for fluorescent lights.

A vacuum tube does the same job that a transistor does. It makes a yes or no decision. Back then the tubes in TVs had to decided which phosphor to light up to produce the required image. Today transistors do the same job, only with much better efficiency. Vacuum tubes only run with a 60% efficiency, so they are power hungry. Transistors run at 90%+ efficiency so they take less power. Since transistors ran at such a poor power ratio they created extra heat and that can cause components to fail. An Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) sends a large charge through electrical devices. When it hits a transistor it is too much energy and it can then burn out the transistor. If we used vacuum tubes then we could handle those electric surges better, but tubes don’t last anywhere near as long as transistors last.

More and more every day items contain computers and transistors, which are run at peak efficiency. If a nuclear bomb is set off besides the explosion it creates a massive EMP. This can destroy any circuit with a transistor in it. Everything from cars to calculators have transistors. Sometimes they are even found in the toaster and the coffee maker. Any item with a digital clock has a transistor inside. This is why an EMP can be so dangerous.

A transistor still basically acts as a yes or no switch letting it handle a yes or no question or to store a 1 or 0 bit of information. When we miniaturize those transistors and sandwich them together by the thousands you have a computer. Binary is the ultimate language of all computers, other higher languages have to run through a process to convert them to machine code and then they convert that to binary. The transistor is the equivalent to a single nerve cell in our brain. However, brain nerve cells do have more abilities than just storing a yes or no answer (we don’t think in binary).

IBM came out with a new transistor process this year. The layer between each group of transistors in modern computers is thick enough to stop stray electrical signals from affecting the other transistors. This limits the size of a processor. IBM has created a new method of putting a new semiconductor layer on top the transistors, which can be thinner thus allowing thinner chips or chips that can include more transistors. Computer chips, especially the memory chips are just stacks of millions of transistors. The computer circuits are so crammed full of transistors that to lay out the schematic of a standard computer CPU (Central Processing Unit) would take a football field.

Answer 3

I remember them well. When I was a kid in the mid 1960's, I used to go to "work" at the radio & TV shop my dad worked at on Saturdays, and I was elected to do the tube testing for walk in customers. The thing must have had about 100 sockets and 4 or 5 knobs and a wire to attach to the larger tubes. Sadly the store went under in the 80's and the behemoth tube tester was sentenced to the trash heap.

Answer 4

I used tube-testers waaay back for just a couple times ... last time was in the late 70's to fix a TV found in an alley in Pacific Beach ... and was able to get a couple LA stations with rabbit ears.

read other answers and wanted to point out that vaccum tubes are almost exclusively *analog* vs "digital" (binary)

vacuuum tubes had a sort of aesthetic appeal to my mind ... used to have a radio with about 5 tubes in it .. without a cover on ... at night next to the bed listening to classical music station a thousand miles away ... the tubes glowed and one of them had a purple glowing gas inside it [this was a thyratron voltage regulator] .. it used to look like a minature space-colony architecture when the lights in the bedroom were turned off and the orange filaments shining on metallic structures inside the glass towers

and if you touched it at the wrong spot, you got a BIG eye-opening shock, but that was ok ... just be careful

Answer 5

I remember going to the Rexall Drug Store several times a year to buy tubes for our tv. There were a couple larger and interesting-looking tubes on display that were blue and red. They intrigued me, but I never found out what kind of tv set they were for.

In the early '70s, we still had black and white tv, and I think finally in 1975 we got our first color tv, a Zenith.

Answer 6

Two of the first TV's on the market were
RCA & Philco.
I recall walking suspect tubes down to
Sammy Simpsons Hardware for free
check outs.
If bad, I would buy a replacement and
BINGO, Uncle Miltie and his Texaco
hour was back in business.

Answer 7

I do. I remember how the TV will grow dark letting you know you will soon be needing a picture tube. Those were the days when people fixed things and did not cast them aside.

Answer 8

I remember the TV repairman coming out to my parents house and testing the tubes. lol guess I just dated myself lol this was in the early 60's

Answer 9

LOL. My Dad still has a couple of them. Along with tubes and a bunch more stuff he used to fix those old sets.

Answer 10

i dont remember em but i got tubes and im 20 and i actually use my tubes still!

Answer 11

yeah i remember those testers . those were the good old days . those days are gone for ever . LOL