Fifty years ago, then FCC Chair Newton Minow gave what remains the most significant speech about electronic media in American history, excoriating the new medium as “A Vast Wasteland.” In the latest edition of the Atlantic Monthly, Minow thoughtfully looks back on that moment in a piece titled “A Vaster Wasteland.” But I’ve lived through the last 50 years of TV history, too. Like so many media reformers, Minow strikes me as reluctant to acknowledge an obvious difference between 1961 and 2011. Television is not a vast wasteland anymore. It’s a crazy, weed-filled, wonderful, out-of-control garden.
In the ’70s and early ’80s, it was trendy to offset tiny, crappy screens with enormous and ornate wooden consoles. My family had one of these when I was a kid—looking back on it, I understand why my father chose to put it on the lowest level of our house. It would have seriously compromised the structural integrity of any floor it was sitting on. [
This is what passed for a widescreen television in 1978. However, the GE Widescreen 1000 really wasn’t widescreen at all. In reality this absurdly huge cabinet housed a small CRT screen that used “a vertical deflection reversing switch to invert and laterally reverse the image, and a three element lens within a light-proof projection chamber to re-invert, magnify and project the image onto a forward projection type reflective screen.” In other words, the image was artificially enlarged through projection. Oh, and that beastly monstrosity sitting next to it is an early VHS recorder. Back in the day, video players like this one could weigh 30 pounds or more. [
Surely you are familiar with the 
The 
Today we have camcorders built into our tiny cellphones. In the ’70s and early ’80s you had to deal with beasts like the Sony SL-F1 Betamax camera. Before the advent of the Betamovie BMC-100P personal camcorder in 1983, the camera and the portable recorder were not integrated into a single unit. [
The JVC HR-4100 was the first ever “portable” VHS recorder, but this woman appears to be in over her head. This is definitely a “team lift” situation. [
We bitch about gas guzzling SUV’s now, but get a load of this ’73 Thunderbird. Seriously, there is enough metal between the cabin and the grill to take on a locomotive. [
Microwaves in the ’70s were big enough to crawl into. According to the owner, this particular model weighed around 80 pounds. [
Bonus: Glasses are not really a gadget, but honestly, what the hell was going on in the ’70s? I have to admit though, Wonder Woman still looks great with those telescopes attached to her face. Anyway, thank God for contacts and Lasik. [