Throwback Thursday

Sixty-three years ago this month the first color TVs were offered for sale to the U.S. public.

Sixty-four years ago this week, Westinghouse unveiled the world’s first color TV in 60 stores throughout New York. The Westinghouse H840CK15 had a tiny 15-inch screen and sold for $1,295 — the equivalent of almost 12 grand in 2018 dollars!

For decades, the cartoons of Charles Rodrigues poked fun at us and the hobby we otherwise take all too seriously.

In the very first issue of HiFi & Music Review in 1958, the magazine that became Stereo Review and then Sound & Vision, a gifted 31-year-old artist named Charles Rodrigues contributed the first in a string of cartoons that both celebrated, and made fun of, that odd bird known as the audiophile. It ended up being a long run that lasted more than 40 years.

Almost a decade after Elvis Presley was dubbed “Elvis the Pelvis” for the “vulgar” act of gyrating his hips on national television, the FBI in reacting to an outcry from parents launched a formal investigation into the supposedly pornographic lyrics of the R&B standard “Louie, Louie,” written and recorded by Richard Berry in 1957 but popularized by The Kingsmen in 1963.

Julian Hirsch’s review of the Bose 901 in 1968 helped set off one of the greatest and longest-lasting audiophile debates.

There may be no singular product in modern audio history that has generated more accolades, derision, or pure controversy than the Bose 901 loudspeaker. Introduced in 1968 by a then four-year-old concern named after its MIT-educated founder, the 901 neither looked, nor sounded, like any speaker that had come before it. With its pentagonal cabinet that faced eight of its nine identical 4-inch, full-range drivers at the reflecting wall behind the speaker, its designer Amar Bose sought to have it mimic the way we hear in concert halls and imbue its sound with a giant soundstage and spatial realism that was unsurpassed.

Forty-four years ago this week the iconic video game company Atari was founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney.

Forty-five years ago this week, the King, donning his iconic white sequin-studded jump suit, made history in Honolulu when more than a billion viewers in 40 countries tuned into Aloha from Hawaii Via Satellite, a live broadcast seen by the largest audience in the history of television.