“The world is moving towards High Definition Television [HDTV]” “Don’t buy a regular TV now, they are going to be better in every way when HDTV comes into market”. Some of the many phrases dropped by people who are loosely following the HDTV effort. When asked, “How do you know?”, these people confidently responded with, “Because technology is just going to get better and better.” Though HDTV is revolutionizing the world, and the technology is getting better, very little thought is put into the effort done by engineers in the leading companies. People expect television to constantly improve, but these improvements do not occur on their own. Rather, they arise from many different factors, such as nationalistic politicians who push American companies to develop HDTV, the computer industry pushing for a digital television, or engineers inventing new ideas.
In Inventing Accuracy, Donald Mackenzie clearly describes a false perception people have regarding improvements in technology, a notion he refers to as a natural trajectory. Through a chronology of the history of nuclear missile guidance, he defines such a trajectory as “a direction of technical development that is simply natural, not created by social interests but corresponding to the inherent possibilities of the technology (pg 167). However, in the context of military guidance, he comes to the conclusion that these things can’t really exist. All trajectories need to be helped along by technical, social, and political pressures. Nothing happens by itself.
Even so, people still believe technologies advance because it is natural phenomenon. Moore’s Law is a prediction that the pace of microchip technology change is such that the amount of data storage that a microchip can hold doubles every year or at least every 18 months. Intel’s 8080 in 1975 had 4500 transistors. In 1995, when Intel introduced the Pentium Pro, it had 5.5 million transistors. However it did not occur because it was on a predestined plan to do so, but rather engineers in Santa Clara working hard to compete with other companies. If no other company that creating chips existed, Intel would most likely be just as happy to fire all its engineers and sell their chips at high prices.
HDTV is no different. This paper strives to analyze HDTV as the product of technological trajectories similar to the way Mackenzie did for nuclear missile guidance. To look under the mask of the natural trajectory and present HDTV as a true product of its surroundings, a manifestation of corporate interests, technical desires, and government goals. This paper also will show that HDTV is not really the natural way of the world, but one method that has been contrived through the involvement of lots of different parties, and done so successfully enough to convince the nation that it’s a natural thing that should be expected and accepted by society as a great technological advancement.
Download pdf HDTV: The Engineering History
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