Retro-Blog 1982 (age 19): Mommy Video

MOMMY VIDEO

Mommy Video - Daddy Video
You've taught me all I know of the world
     from my black-and-white memories
     to my Technicolor dreams

You've made me what I am
Please make me part of what you are

Grab me by the eyes and pull me in
Soak me up through your phosphor dots
Feed me back through your electron guns
Modulate me on your carrier wave
Send me back through the ether
             to where it all began 

Store me on reels of video tape

Mommy Video - Daddy Video 
Take me home

[Editorial Note 2015 (age 52): The technology described here remained pretty much unchanged from the earliest days of television in the mid-twentieth century until the relatively recent mandated transition to digital broadcast in 2009, and around the same time the transition from CRT tubes to solid state imaging devices for television was well underway.  I'm not sure how I would write this in terms of current television technology in the United States.  For all I know there are some parts of the world that still use analog broadcast and CRT displays.  

You may notice that the "Retro-Blog" entries are so far all clustered around 1977 (age 14) and 1982 (age 19).   For reasons about which I may speculate at a later time, a large amount of my written output is clustered around these years, but eventually I will post equally unremarkable works from other years.  For now, this was just something I could put out quickly to maintain my self-imposed discipline of daily postings until I run out of material that I am willing to expose to an imaginary public.

As an aside, no matter how confident any scientist or technician may sound, nobody knows how radio, and thus television, really works at the most fundamental level.  We know how to build devices that generate, encode, detect and decode radio signals, but we don't really know in real physical terms how the signal gets from the transmitter to the receiver.  This statement is virtually blasphemy in current western culture where Science has been degraded into a sort of religion for people who are too clever for metaphysics and too arrogant or afraid to admit that there are still things not yet known, or perhaps even unknowable.]