Analog and digital TV channels on cable -- why?

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Penthode

Jeff, I too liked your well thought out post. I do however take exception to your statement of Bill Gates and his contribution to the world wide web. If I recall, Microsoft was late in the game and I remember the frantic catch up in the late '90's.

After all, Bill Gate's did even earlier exclaim that 640k RAM should be enough for anybody!

Ooooops! I always thought Bill Gates was instrumental in the formation of the Internet and what we now know as the World Wide Web, but I may well have been off by a few years as to the actual start of these services.

Gates' statement that 640K of RAM "should be enough for anybody" may well have been true in the very, very early days of home computers pre-Internet, when everybody was connecting to cyberspace using such online services as CompuServe, et al. However, once the Internet became an established system, it became all too clear that 640K -- just over a half megabyte -- would be nowhere near enough memory for any Internet-connected computer intended for use in a home environment; for business, forget it! Try to run any computer with anything much under 1GB of memory on today's Internet and you are asking for trouble, in the form of BSODs (blue screens of death) and system crashes -- if the computer runs at all. My first Windows computer, running Microsoft Windows 95, had just eight megabytes of RAM, and a CPU that ran at 133 MHz. I was just getting started with the Internet at the time, and was constantly frustrated when my system would crash every time I tried to run more than one program at a time.

My next Windows computer had Windows 98SE and a much faster CPU (600 MHz), which made my Win95 starter system look like a turtle, but I still had occasional system crashes when I was running two or more programs at once, say my word processor and my Winamp media player; the system would almost always crash if I used two or more memory-intensive programs at the same time.

I got my present Windows XP computer in late 2010 from an accountant friend of mine, who was upgrading his entire office to Windows 7. What a difference WinXP has made (and continues to make) in my daily computing experience! The computer my friend gave me, a PowerSpec model 8736 (which is also my primary box now; the Win98 system is in my bedroom and is used very infrequently to transfer old programs on floppies from it to CD-Rs) has a 2-GHz processor, just under 1GB of RAM, and, needless to say, runs rings around the old Win98 computer -- even when I am using several programs simultaneously. Add to this the fact that I just recently (as in about six months ago, more or less) upgraded my Internet connection from DSL to cable broadband, and the result is a system that almost never crashes; in fact, it runs 1000 percent better than either of my other computers. I recently replaced the CRT monitor on my system with an HP S2031 20" widescreen flat-panel when the degausser or some circuit connected with the former went bad, causing the raster to bow inward. I still use that monitor on my old system, but now that I have the FP monitor on my WinXP computer I won't go back.

Even if my CRT monitor hadn't developed that raster bend, I probably would have replaced it soon anyway because it was getting old, and whatever had failed in the unit (degaussing coil, thermistor, etc.) to cause the bend had been burning when the problem first started; I wasn't exactly worried or afraid the thing might catch fire, but then again one never knows about these things. Since I was no longer smelling the burning parts a day or two later, however, I decided to keep the monitor since it seemed to be working after a fashion, albeit with a bowed-in raster (pincushioning). Whatever had been burning in that monitor (the smell was very faint; I could notice it only if I poked my nose right up against the air vents on the left side of the cabinet) must have failed completely after a week or so, as the burning smell disappeared at that point as well and did not return.

This now completes my technology upgrades from CRTs to flat panels, as I bought a flat-screen HDTV last August to replace my 12-year-old analog set which still works quite well. However, I am keeping my analog TVs -- the RCA set and a 16-year-old Zenith Sentry 2 -- as reminders of the old NTSC analog days, and for sentimental reasons (the Zenith Sentry 2 was a birthday present to me on my 39th birthday).

These sets will work without a box (for now) when connected to my analog cable service, but I realize that the day is coming, sooner rather than later, when analog cable will be completely phased out in this country. This probably won't affect my flat-panel HD set in the least, as it has an NTSC/ATSC/clear-QAM tuner (as do all flat-panel HD televisions), but it will render my NTSC CRT sets useless for anything other than possible future use with a VCR or DVD player. Since I only have one of each of these units, and they are currently connected to my living-room HD flat-panel, however, I think my CRT sets will probably just sit in my bedroom from now on, gathering dust, but still serving to remind me of the days when we all watched television on something called a picture tube, in something called the NTSC television standard.

But do I miss NTSC analog TV, over two years after the transition? No. I think 1080p ATSC digital television has it all over the old system; the pictures are much sharper and clearer than even the best analog set can deliver, and the sets, not to mention today's cable and broadcast signals, are much more stable than the old ones ever were. Of course, the new FP HDTVs don't last nearly as long as the old CRTs, but that's the way of it with everything nowadays.