We weren’t always stupid

I was skimming through some 1966 RCA periodicals at American Radio Library just for jollies. RCA was demonstrating a fancy time and temperature screen generated by one of those newfangled Electric Brains:

Ping! That’s KHQ in Spokane!

Nah, impossible. The last time I watched broadcast TV was 2010. They couldn’t have been using the same logo from 1966 to 2010.

Next page:

Well, they did use the same logo for 45 years, and it had the desired effect of instant brand recognition, even after I hadn’t seen it for 15 years.

But the display wasn’t exactly a computer, it was built locally by KHQ’s own engineers. We weren’t always stupid, and we didn’t always rely on China for everything!

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A few words about the time and temperature display also designed and built by KHQ-TV engineers. As can be seen by the photo, the time and temperature are displayed by computer type readouts.

Readout of the time is accomplished in a series of ring counters which are sampled for time accuracy each minute by a pulse from the station’s master clock, which in turn is referenced each hour to WWV. This assures that the time presented is automatically kept accurate to a split second. Temperature is read out automatically from a thermistor mounted outside the building and is part of a bridge circuit and servo system. Conversion to digital display is by mechanical switching.

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Pretty damn fine engineering. Mixed digital, analog, bridge and servomechanism, plus mechanical flippers, plus remote sensing, plus calibration by WWV.

The main point of the article, of course, was RCA cameras and switchers, built in Camden, New Jersey, not Shenzhen or Shanghai.