Consumer Electronics
In the past, consumer electronics manufacturers would emblazon radios and TV sets with "Instant On" or "Instant Play" decals. In series filament sets, instant on was accomplished by adding only a silicon diode across the power switch to keep tube filaments lit at 50% power; the diode was placed such that the typical half wave rectifier of the day was reverse-biased. Instant on advantages included near-instant operation of the television or radio and potentially longer vacuum tube life; disadvantages included energy consumption and risk of fire. Most solid state consumer electronics are inherently instant on, so the moniker survived into the early solid state era to differentiate a product from its vacuum-tube based brethren (with CRTs being a notable exception).
Read more about this topic: Instant On
Famous quotes containing the words consumer and/or electronics:
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)