BB pal Drew Carey snapped the photo above in the Price Is Right studio. From Drew's Twitter stream:
A patch panel from the 1950's that we still use. Surprised our studio monitors don't use vacuum tubes. :)Drew Carey on Twitter
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9:38 pm Tue
Jun 23, 2009
Price Is Right's midcentury modern tech
What if school was out, forever?
Today a future without schools. Instead of gathering students into a room and teaching them, everybody learns on their own time, on tablets and guided by artificial intelligence. Flash Forward: RSS | iTunes | Twitter | Facebook | Web | Patreon | RedditIn this episode we talk to a computer scientist who developed an artificially […]
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Lament for the hard drive
Where are our petabyte drives? Brian Hayes takes us through the reasons storage is “stuck” in the low terabytes. The tl;dr is that we got such exceptional capacity growth in the late 90s and early 00s we don’t need much more right now, so the focus since then has been on SSDs, networking, interfaces, etc, […]
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Squarespace staffer claims exec told them "you’re so black, you blend into the chair"
Amélie Lamont, a former staffer at website-hosting startup Squarespace, writes that she often found herself disregarded and disrespected by her colleagues. One comment in particular, though, set her reeling — and came to exemplify her experiences there.
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Here's how Big Data could change your career
With all of the digital information out there—from credit card numbers to Instagram posts to consumer behavior—there’s so much data that businesses struggle with the task of storing, managing, and analyzing the information. That’s why Big Data is one of the fastest growing career paths in the world. Big Data is a giant, intimidating subject, which is why […]
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Stop borrowing your friend's phone charger and grab this 3-pack of Lightning cables
We’re always searching for, borrowing, and losing Lightning cables, and that’s why we are loading up with the Apple MFi-Certified Lightning Cable: 3-Pack.These Apple-certified USB cables let you charge your iPhone, iPad, or iPod via any USB port—whether you prefer your computer or the Apple USB Power Adapter. And since there’s three of them, you never […]
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These two Mophie gadgets will help keep you connected on the go
Mophie’s gadgets are reliable, minimalist, and stacked with all the right features. We use these two gadgets to keep our phones, tablets, e-readers, and other electronics charged.Recharge on-the-go with the Mophie Powerstation XL External BatteryThe Mophie Powerstation XL ($39.95) packs enough power to re-charge your phone eight times over. It has three levels of charging, so […]
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I love stuff like this.
My high school had a little analog TV switch panel to send video from big reel-to-reel video tape units to various classrooms. A tiny version of the mess shown above.
Yeah, I was in the A.V. squad. We set up tapes and started them at the appointed hour. We also had a couple of breadloaf-sized video cameras and transportable VTRs we could wheel to a classroom to tape plays or debates or whatever.
Looks like Auntie Mame’s switchboard:
If you’ve ever wondered why they can’t restart the Range Game for 37 hours once the rangefinder’s been stopped, this is why.
Lighting hard patch.
Still very useful.
Yeah, CBS Television City is a treasure trove of antique TV stuff. I was in a storeroom once, it was full of obsolete TV equipment like old Ampex 2 inch videotape machines that were probably decommissioned in the late 1960s, and old TV monitors that were round (must date back to the 1950s). I think they just keep that stuff around in case they need it as props.
I object to the term midcentury. We are no longer in the 20th century.
“Surprised our studio monitors don’t use vacuum tubes. :)”
So am I, since CRTs are still usually considered superiour to LCD monitors.
Wow, if you guys are impressed by that, I should snap a photo of the Master Control Room at the Norwegian Broadcasting Company.
Yeah, a few months ago I was so lucky as to see a 2-inch Quadruplex VTR in operation (transferring some archive material over to Digibeta). The perpendicular-scan video head spinup sound is supremely satisfying.
hey, if it ain’t broke…
@#5
I think at least some of it is kept around for those rare times when someone finds a box of old, unmarked media stuffed away in a drawer. Just in case they find things like Johnny Carson’s first tonight show broadcast, it’d be nice if they had the means to play it / transfer it.
(yeah, I know, The tonight show’s not a CBS property. Work with me here people.)
If it ain’t broke. . . .
(However in this case, if it IS broke. . . oy vey!)
I imagine this stuff hangs-on because the downtime required to yank it out, replace it with modern kit, and get the new stuff sorted-out and de-bugged would conflict with the tight production schedules. And, if it still gets the job done…
Built, no doubt, before the days of electronic routers. So there are undoubtedly racks of DA’s (distribution amps) behind the outbound patch points, as patchbays are not point-to-multipoint.
The racks of DA’s, however, are far less photogenic. Until you go around to the rear of the rack.
Telephone patch panels solve the problem in a very nice old-school way. They also literally last forever, as shown here.
You can bet the dimmers they connect to are probably 4000 watts and up as well. Modern equipment has gone the way of smaller and more, but there’s something nice about knowing you can just keep plugging gear into a 7k dimmer without having to worry about running out of juice.
A graticule.
We used an old Strand lighting patch bay at our theater company, similar to that for years, until it was replaced about a decade ago. It handled 3/4 of a megawatt and sat at the back corner of the fly floor. When it was full loaded and they brought up a bright scene, the conduits running to them would hum so loud that it made you nervous to stand near it.