General Electric Show ‘n Tell Phono-viewer, model A-600, made on November 16th, 1964
Such a wild technology, where a phonograph record was synced with a 16mm film strip cartridge that showed the story being told on disc. A couple years later, RCA would start developing the RCA Selectavision video-on-analog-disc format that would flop spectacularly in the 1980s.
We had a version of this in our high school library learning lab, but it was cassette-tape based. More advanced versions had a BOOP audio signal on the tape that would auto advance the filmstrip. This was basically PowerPoint before personal computers.
I had a Show’N Tell. It looked just like that top one in the photo above. It was in the room I shared with my brother in the house on Hilton Avenue in Redlands, which would make me about four years old, before the first of the four divorces we lived through growing up.
The one I remember watching on it was The Count of Monte Christo, especially the image of Dantès wrapped in Faria’s burial sack sinking into the ocean.
This entry was posted by jbc on Sunday, February 6th, 2022 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Tumblr.
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