google buys Motorola

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 son says I'm an Amishman, because I find some technology that suits me and stick with it. (This post is being written on a 2005-vintage laptop, because I don't watch movies and don't want to lose two inches of screen height for nothing.)

But I only remember the Quasars from seeing them advertised on TV when I was about five years old. (All our TVs growing up were Admirals.)

I decided what I wanted to do with my life at age 5 as well. I know the age because I was watching a kids' science show called Discovery '65, which I really liked--I'd also watched its predecessor, Discovery '64, at age 4. One morning, they had a guy on who said that scientific and technical knowledge was expanding so fast that in the future, the need would be for people who could synthesize it. I remember saying to myself, "That's what I want to do." And that's what I do.

(Didn't some random guy remark about the child being the father of the man?) ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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

From what I saw, the problem was TV repairmen who had no clue how to fix a solid state TV. They used Weller solder guns to change parts on the boards, and most would solder the modules to the connectors, so they could no longer be exchanged for troubleshooting. A Quasar repairman carried a custom caddy with a full set of modules for that chassis and found the bad module, before randomly changing parts. They didn't have the Motorola factory manuals, with step by step troubleshooting and they had no clue which generation of modules could be interchanged., so the would shove in non compatible modules and declare the set was poorly designed crap.

We never had problems getting new or rebuilt modules, but we sold most of the Motorola TVs in that town. Mine was the second Quasar sold in that town. Other dealers fought over the Zenith & Magnavox market, and cut each others throats. About 3/4 of the shops didn't sell any new TVs, so they got no factory training and their work showed it.

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.

Panasonic was around over three decades ago, so maybe they bought Matsushita, who were component makers. Panasonic were makers of many consumer products and owning their own transistor company was probably forward thinking back then.

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.

Rhetorical questions alert:

Why are you always wrong, AlwaysWrong? Matsushita was the company that made the Panasonic brand (and others), for almost a hundred years (not thirty), until the company was renamed "Panasonic" in the early '00s. Have you never heard of Google, or Wiki?

I wonder how much of Motorola's [one-time] position in commercial and public safety radio systems is still Motorola. And if it is still there, will google keep it?

?-)

OK.

The stereos they sold in the '70s were shit.

Digikey has almost 275,000 2N6027s and 2N6028s available.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Might be worthwhile to stick out financial neck a bit and sell short or better sell PUTs..

Well...they were never _quite_ as bad as (you know who)

The early Quasar TV's weren't all that horrible. Please remember that I worked for a repair shop, which only saw the broken TV's. I'm sure there were plenty of people with fully functional Quasar TV's. It's just that I didn't see any of those.

I don't recall any semiconductor failures. Instead, I saw mostly mechanical failures, handling failures, adjustment failures, and general abuse. Slamming the drawer back into the cabinet was good for a shredded cable. Adjusting the front panel color controls beyond the potentiometer stops was good for a broken pot. The tuner knob would sometimes get suck, and break if forced. Of course, easy access to adjustments meant that customers with screwdrivers were capable of gross misalignment. If it moved, it broke. Oddly, the phenolic PCB's were not a problem.

Actually I think the Panasonic brand only goes back to the 1950's when they seriously started to export radios and TVs outside Japan and into the English speaking world like America, Australia and the UK.

Matsushita was too much of a tongue twister and could be decomposed in unfavourable ways by syllables. They were brandname National in Japan for a long while before that. Early exports to the UK at least were in the name of National Panasonic some stuff was cheap junk in the days before "Made in Japan" was indicative of a quality product. eg

The renaming and phasing out of National as a domestic Japanese brand is very recent (last couple of years).

From my perspective Motorola was worst than Maxim. It could be the sales rep was filtering the vapourware from Maxim.