THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 26, 1996 TAG: 9608260233
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OPINION
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: 51 lines
Higher and higher tech.
Two recent items in the news tell us of yet more dizzying heights about to be scaled in the field of electronics.
One was the announcement that IBM is going to build a whiz of a speedy new supercomputer. This marvel will be 300 times faster than the most-powerful computer now in operation. And that's beyond comprehension, in light of the mind-boggling things that even ordinary desktops and laptops do every day.
But as exciting as the prospect of all that new computer speed may be, the research-and-development breakthrough that recently jolted my own mind the most had to do with television.
Appropriately enough, I first heard about this leap of progress on TV. The announcement was part of a video newscast, and it sent my mind back to some of my teenage thoughts about the things science might one day bring to pass.
I guess it was in the early '30s. Airplane evolution was well along; I had seen great dirigibles fly over my Ballentine Place neighborhood in Norfolk; radio was surging beyond the battery-powered sets and homemade antenna rigs that I remembered from not many years earlier; Alexander Graham Bell's telephones (ours was a ``party line'') were becoming commonplace; motion pictures were already a staple of ordinary people's lives.
But television wasn't even a word yet, at least not in my hearing or reading.
It was along about then that I had this neat fantasy.
Wouldn't it be great if - instead of framed paintings and prints, with only the life that the artists' skill could suggest, instead of still photographs that captured only a split second in time - the walls of our homes could display pictures in which things moved, somewhat like the action in the Ken Maynard and Jack Holt cowboy movies I got to see on an occasional Saturday afternoon (for 10 cents, incidentally)?
Maybe these wall pictures would have continuous animation; maybe the action would start and stop only on command. Whatever. They would be real, fun-to-watch ``moving pictures.''
Well, when television as we know it now came along, the bulky sets only partially brought my dream to life. You sure couldn't hang them on the wall; even putting them in niches didn't do the trick.
But now? Which brings me back to that video breakthrough I was talking about. It seems that some among our modern Bells and Morses and Edisons are going to give us television sets that are super-THIN. One of them, hung on a wall, will look just like an old-fashioned picture! But not quite.
With results like that, a fellow just has to keep on dreaming. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk. by CNB