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brock_lee t1_ixxoucv wrote

Father in law worked at NIST (and it predecessor the Bureau of Standards) for 35 years or something. In radio propagation. Got some cool stories about things like color TV. The first specs brought to the government would have rendered B/W TVs useless, and they said "go back and make black and white, and color TVs work on the same frequencies, it can be done." Also, the first draft for the emergency broadcast system had circuitry inside radios and TVs, until they showed how easy it was to hack, so the system changed, and the system was set up via broadcasters, not the devices.

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LipTrev t1_ixz2p9a wrote

> Got some cool stories about things like color TV. The first specs brought to the government would have rendered B/W TVs useless, and they said "go back and make black and white, and color TVs work on the same frequencies, it can be done.

B&W TVs being able to use the color signal, and later mono TVs being able to use the stereo signal was always such a cool bit of engineering.

I love that the audio method especially: an L+R signal and then an L-R signal that the stereo TVs use to create L and R signals through addition for L and inversion and then addition for R.

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