THE SETAbout MeSo you're back. Here goes:
You already know I'm sixty and have an interest in color TV. I've always had an interest in television and radio and transmitters and nearly anything electronic. Sometimes to the chagrin of my parents. Neat stuff like reading a book on basic electronics was usually substituted for homework.
 BTW: Yes, I was named the youngest-looking dude there! So I never got very good marks in high school. But always managed to stay in the "academic" course as it was known then. Then I flunked the first semester of senior English. Somebody must have thought I deserved a chance, so 'they' put me in a remedial English class with three other same-boat-as-me types. Something clicked. The teacher was nice, a good teacher, and she taught me the basics of sentence structure, punctuation, and grammar. It was an important factor fourteen years later, as you will see if you stay….
After high school I attended two different technical schools for the next three years. Temple University in Philadelphia had a technical institute that taught electronics using examples from the many varied circuit functions found in television sets of the fifties. About the time I was halfway through, they shifted their emphasis from the television set to… well, it wasn't so much TO something as it was away from television circuits. So I never made that 'senior' course in color TV. The administration had shut it down and I never got my hands on the seven or so RCA-supplied CT-100 sets the school had used in the lab-part of the course. They had been supplied to the school years before by RCA at Camden, just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. [I often wonder if they weren't some of the 200 or so model 5s built for the first NTSC color network broadcast of the 1954 Rose Bowl parade.] During the summer preceding my second year at tech school, when my first hands-on television labs would be given, I built a 2-inch (2AP1A) television in a small suitcase, sort of a headstart thing. I built it from two or three junked sets from the '40s and early '50s. Link below to views of it scanned from a 1975 magazine article. For some dumb reason, I threw that homebrew out during a move in early 1979. It gets worse: you know the "Titanic" color portable old Rose watched in her kitchen at the beginning of the movie? I threw one of them out during another move in 1994! Bought it in 1976 because it was so neat. Guess Cameron thought so too. I still have its 12V-power cord! 
Owhatthehell: back when I threw out my homemade 2-inch set, I also canned a 1947 Farnsworth; you know, the one with the heavy glass front? Circuit was based on the RCA 630. Stupid.
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