Re: google buys Motorola

The "Quasar" models were transistor sets (circa 1964, I believe). I remember a trade journal remarking that Motorola had gotten all-transistor color TV to market two years before it was anticipated.

The "works in a drawer" were intended to simplify service. The technician simply swapped boards (assuming the problem wasn't something not on the boards). Motorola's goal was to keep track of what failed, and gradually improve the boards' reliability.

Of course, a system of individual boards is inherently more-expensive than "works on A board", not to mention the need to standardize signal levels and power voltages. It was economically doomed from the start. But it was a good idea.

The proof of this is that we now repair equipment the same way -- we simply replace "everything", either by tossing out the single over-populated circuit board, or the product altogether.

Most industrial products (and automotive, and computer, and appliance) are still repaired like the Quasar sets- replacement at the module level, followed by rebuilding (maybe) or discarding (often) the bad module.

We don't generally replace the whole product except on low end and on TVs- we swap out a power supply, an LCD screen or keyboard, a dying lithium battery or a refrigerator thermostat.

With transistorized (and especially IC) TVs, they became so reliable that adding money to simplify repairs became a liability. Most of us have dumped perfectly working 20+ year old Sony etc. TVs who's only offense was to be become out of fashion and unattractive compared to their newer bretherin.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Oh yes, I remember those nightmares. The Quasar was all transistor except for the CRT. The HOT was a transistor.

"The works in the drawer" or "The junk in the trunk"?

The problem was not so much that the design was marginal, convergence was hell, the connectors didn't quite work, or the boards would blow up if inserted with the power turn on. There were also multiple versions and mutations, some of which were mututally incompatible. Despite the clever construction, it was difficult to probe some of the boards. There were allegedly extender cards, but we never were able to obtain any.

The problem was that Motorola was trying to follow the RCA example of forcing the independent service shops out of business by controlling their access to parts. At first, one had to be "authorized" which simply meant going through an ordeal process and purchasing an unreasonable amount of spare parts. The problem was that many shops were cannibalizing old TV's for parts, or using non-factory replacements. So, Motorola figured that they could eliminate the practice by only selling board level replacements. Of course, Motorola would also control refurbished boards and demanded all defective board be returned for repair. I don't recall exactly, but we also had to report our inventory of replacement Quasar boards to Motorola. In California at the time, the "fair trade" laws were fully functional, allowing Motorola to set a MINIMUM price for selling replacement boards. Nobody thought to clone the cards at the time.

Nothing worked as planned. At the time all of the repairs we did were under warranty, which were flat rate, and rarely made a profit. Only out of warranty repairs made money. Motorola would seperately handle warranty and out of warranty board replacements, charging different amounts for each. Their out of warrany charges were sufficient that the shop didn't make any money and that the customers had a bad case of sticker shock. Motorola hyped the Quasar as somehow reducing repair costs, but that didn't last long.

Note that one of the above advertisement suggest that it could be fixed in the home and would not require a trip to the shop. That was true because the chassis and the receiver were in seperate sections of the cabinet, and the interconnecting cables were nailed to the cabinet. This meant the entire cabinet had to go into the shop for repair. It also meant that all field repairs required two trips to the home, as none of the vans carried a full collection of boards and their multiple mutations.

We didn't do much with Quasar, prefering other brands that offered better margins and more available parts. One of the competitors complained that they had to cannibalize boards out of new display TV sets in order to fix other sets.

What a catastrophe! The very first generation of Germanium transistors were fairly reliable, but by the mid 60's when they went to silicon epitaxial transistors with glass passivation, things should have been VERY reliable. Discrete transistor computers with thousands of transistors are still running in museums and such. So, Motorola must have done something really wrong to make it so bad. Maybe poorly made PC boards and crummy tin connectors were a lot of the problem.

Jon

My recollection (and I'm pretty sure about it) is the very first Quasars were 100% SS, including the HV rectifier. Shortly after, they went back to a tube rectifier for a while before going completely solid state again when the improved the HV semi components.

John

I'm not sure what you mean by this Jeff. I recall the RCA had a unique warranty on the XL100s that allowed the warranty to be serviced by ANY repair company authorized or not, at least initially (1971 or so). Later on they went back to authorized service centers, but we NEVER had trouble getting parts or service. RCA always had excellent schematics and tech support right up until RCA's demise. I know a lot of service shops hated RCA because they were among the first to do away with modules and require component level repair, including smds.

John

That was second generation Quasar. First generation used a 3 volt Vacuum tube HV recitifer. They used the same base chassis, with a different flyback, and MOST of the modules were interchangable, but not all of them.

And Matsushita became Panasonic a decade or so ago.

My experience with this was in about 1964 through 1967. I was going High Skool and college while working part time at a local repair shop. We were authorized to do warranty work for Akai, Roberts, Craig, Concord, Sony, and some others that I can't recall. However, we were not authorized for RCA or Motorola. It would have cost too much for a small shop.

I don't recall such a liberal warranty arrangement. At the time, RCA was again reorganizing its repair network and was doing its best to kill off the small repair shops. They may have changed their tune later, but since I was on the bench, and not in the office, I didn't know exactly what was happening. All I heard were complaints by the owners about RCA and Motorola.

Both RCA and Motorola had the same strategy. If the service shop wanted the profitable out of warranty business, it had to also take the not so profitable in warranty business. I vaguely recall that I could take about 1.5 hrs per TV maximum (including unboxing and reboxing) after which the shop loses money.

I vaguely recall that the move to control service through authorized service centers started in about 1969. I was off doing other things by then and wasn't paying much attention to TV repair politics.

Agreed. In a later job, I repaired and installed a few RCA Carfone and Super Carfone (mostly 500 and 700) mutations. They were good radios for their day, but the equivalent GE PreProg and Progress Line and Motorola T43/T44 radios were better. RCA had the amazing ability to design mobile radios that didn't fit well into vehicles. I'm not sure how they managed that.

As I recall, GE, Motorola, and RCA documentation were great and far better than what I see today. I could have done without the gigantic foldout schematics, but that was the fashion of the day in schematics and I was not in a position to ask for something that would actually fit on my bench.

For some reason, I don't recall the condition of RCA TV schematics and documentation. I did use quite a bit from Sams Photofact, but I don't think that was needed for RCA or Motorola. I do recall complaining about the RCA schematics not matching the shipped products, and was soon blessed with a call from someone at RCA offering to fix the discrepancies. I don't recall if anything ever changed as I didn't stick around long enough to find out.

I don't recall that. Wasn't it the other way around? I thought RCA went to modules and discouraged component replacements, but my memory is rather foggy on that. I do recall that Motorola Quasar went from components to module replacement which dramatically raised the cost of replacement board and parts inventory.

remember the zenith modules and exchange depots?

"The works in a drawer, and the drawer in the shop."

Which promptly put all "the works" on one pc board.

A friend worked there at the time of the takeover. Interestingly, he said the first to be laidoff were the Japanese-Americans -- apparently people who looked Japanese but acted American unsettled the people from Matsushita. He hung on as long as he could but Panasonic finally laid everyone off.

At that time, Zenith was suing the Japanese for dumping TVs at less than cost in the US. But apparently the US government had a conscious policy of yielding the US consumer electronics business to Japan, in order to keep them a happy ally. Thus the companies that had made Chicago a world center of consumer electronics: Motorola, National Video, Warwick, Wells-Gardner, Zenith and Rauland, and Admiral, all eventually were pushed out of the business. Some were bought by far Eastern companies like Sanyo and Lucky-Goldstar.

The policy was introduced with the first XL100s, which were modular designs. I don't know for how long they did this, but i know I have an old Electronic Servicing kicking around somewhere that had an ad that included that strange warranty. I'll see if I can find it, scan it, and get you a copy. Back when the first SS TVs were introduced, TV techs were terrified of transistors, and having most active components on modules took some of the fear away. It also helped allay the fears of consumers of this new technology. Lots of TV owners back then would pull their own tubes, bring them to a local dealer to test, and replace many of them. Of course, modules add cost, complexity, and reduce reliability, so manufacturers did away with modules when they could.

RCAs first transistor color TV was the "Trans Vista" line that predated the XL100 by a couple of years (68-70?). The Trans Vista was nearly identical to the XL100 electrically (including the sophisticated SCR sweep), but was physically laid out like a CTC39X; no modules at all. It was a lot like a 39X without tubes (although the first year used a tube HV rect, second year a tripler). These TVs were expensive and in limited quantity. We sold a handful and they were bullet proof, unlike earlier tube RCAs that drove us nuts (flybacks burning up in a few hours after delivery was not uncommon) I suspect that once RCA saw the Trans Vistas were trouble free (and they were), they introduced the XL100 modular TV with a big advertising budget. The only controversy I can remember about the first XL100 is that a few of their modules were ceramic, surface mount, and encapsulated. The three kine outputs and the audio amp are the ones I can remember. Some speculated that RCA was trying to keep techs from repairing the modules, but I suspect it was more about production cost and reliability. Soon after, those boards were redesigned to be conventional phenolic with leaded components, and were fully compatible front and back.

Later, RCA was the first domestic to go to a unitized chassis doing away with all modules and even transistor sockets, joining the imports in the way TVs were made. I remember a lot of guys at service seminars bitching about having to unsolder transistors to check them (they had to learn how to check them with a meter and scope in a hurry). I always had a bit of a soft spot for this company, and I hope Jack Welch burns in hell for what he did to them.

John

At the time, before robotic components and board handling, if you cut a board in half, it would double the price. Each board had to carry its own cost burden of stuffing, handling, soldering, testing, inventory, shipping, etc, not to mention the interconnect costs. It was a huge cost savings to put everything on a single board, with one exception. If the yield was lousy and the board did not have sufficient test points and documentation to repair, then all the cost savings went into the dumpster.

Zenith was an oddity. While everyone else was promoting the benefits of printed circuit boards, Zenith was proclaiming the superiority of their "hand wired" chassis.

Yep. I don't know the details, but I was told that the import duties and tax laws of late 1960's were structured to make it cheaper to build a product in Japan, than in the USA. Also, Japan's import duties made it prohibitively expensive to import consumer products into Japan.

Gosh, this really sounds like US and China today, except with China it is almost all labor containing products.

?-)

...and we *still* haven't learned that lesson.

There's a lot in parallel. Remember - just about everything in China has the aspect of a Potemkin village. They manage to do well because they throw a *lot* of hands at it, and adapt process to meet requirements at a deep level. The country's run by engineers, and they know how to set and fill metrics. By "engineers", I mean some real Dilberts, too.

"After the meeting at which Jobs expressed his dissatisfaction, one of his execs booked a flight to China, where he knew there was a factory that could mobilize three thousand workers on a moments notice, by which I mean, waking them up in their dorm beds, putting them on the production line, and training them to cut the glass for the iPhone screen."

That's a a synopsis of a lot of articles form reputable sources. I have to wonder how important the latencies involved really are? Why in the world would another week before rollout make any difference?

I don't mean "Potemkin village" as a perjorative; they're trying to figure it out as best they can. But they completely seem to be failing at developing a consumer culture much. Maybe that is good; I don't know.

but eventually the prices are gonna equalize in China. Then we'll see.

It can also be considered to be a lot like America, in the period before the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. There are a lot of ways to do this sort of thing...

-- Les Cargill

Seriously; read Peter Drucker. He set them on that path, and one thing Japanese culture is good at is preserving that kind of idea over long spans of time.

There is a Nova about the making of a katana, and it's engrossing and somewhat terrifying at the same time.

The level of commitment to the process seems to pretty much be the point of the object itself. The closest I can get in Western culture is something like Mount Rushmore or a cathedral like Chartres.

The piece gives of the aroma of "industrial process as religious devotional." I don't get the sense that any of it is actually written down.

-- Les Cargill

Not exactly. Production in Japan was initially due to low labor costs, true, but that was only part of the story. The practice of "dumping" by the Japanese on America was strictly Japanese business sense. As early as the 50s, Japanese housewives were marching in protest at the high prices charged Japanese consumers for TVs. This while dumping same said TVs at astonishingly low prices in the US to successfully gut the market. In short, this practice of dumping, supported by exorbitant prices in Japan and Japanese govt support drove the practice to new heights. Motorcycles were another benefactor. Later cars. Most of this changed when many US companies, initially led by Harely-Davidson, finally demanded protection from dumping. Later, it became cheaper to build in the US --hence US Japanese car companies-- than face high import tariffs. Also, the now prosperous Japanese consumer demanded higer wages to buy all this stuff.

That's still a practice, but less so than in the past. Specially with food, Japan no longer able to feed her own ever growing population. Another approach was to partner up with a Japanese company to get around import duties, which our company did in the 90s.

nb