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I and a friend built the large console set in 1962 for our college
dorm TV room. I built the 19 inch tabletop set in 1967. These were all-tube sets.
Despite what other people say here they really were as good as sets got at those
times. Color rendition was near-perfect ... the color matrix was not
intentionally screwed up like so many sets were. And they were reliable and
very easy to service when a tube died.
The Achilles heel of the 19 inch set was that it used a rare
CRT with extra-fine dot pitch. Mine developed a heater-cathode short
the morning of the first moon landing. I called every distributor
and repair place in Boston and nobody had one. So I tried Cambridge and
the first repair place I called had one ... they were four blocks from my house!
And, being Heathkit, there were complete instructions for
changing the tube. We were ready for a party to see the landing.
I miss Heathkit, though I have built far larger or more
ambitious projects "from scratch" including
such things as a computer tape drive controller and a
pipelined time-to-amplitude-to-digital convertor all in ECL
... runs at 2 gHz. Its good to expect something to work,
and you could do that with Heathkits.
Doug McDonald
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