In the past, when you went up on stage and fucked up, the worst that could happen was that the audience would walk out on you. In this case, when you fuck up, the audience will kill you.
– The Hollywood Sign
The first experimental television station on the West Coast started with Don Lee, in Los Angeles, on December 23, 1932. Commercial television got off the ground in Los Angeles at 50-56 MHz — on Channel One.
Don Lee, who had exclusive distribution rights in California for Cadillacs, bought radio station KFRC in San Francisco in 1926. A year later he purchased KHJ in Los Angeles and established a radio lab in the top floor of his auto dealership. Lee connected the two radio stations rogether to allow interchange of programs. The McClatchy stations at Fresno, Stockton and Sacramento joined the fledgling network in December of 1928.
The Don Lee Broadcasting System was one of the first to broadcast television. The work started in 1930, and by November 1931 the television transmitter W6XAO was on the air in Los Angeles. The television system was built around a disc scanning system by 1936. It took 5-7 minutes to bring the sync motor up to the required 3600 rpm.
News footage of the 1933 Long Beach earthquake was televised to L.A. viewers – the first documented evidence of television news coverage. There were only between 400 and 500 television receivers in the service area of W6XAO, at the time.
W6XAO was also the first remote with a live telecast of the Tournament of Roses Parade on January 1st, 1940. A studio/transmitter site was built above the HOLLYWOODLAND sign (NPR story), to serve Los Angeles. Lee’s Los Angeles station is now KCBS-TV.
When the transcontinental facilities of the CBS radio network were extended to the Pacific Coast, Don Lee and the McClatchy stations were invited to provide Columbia’s California outlets. Four other stations in Oregon and Washington were added to the Don Lee network. By 1930, the Don Lee Columbia network was a nine-station Pacific Coast hookup.
Many Los Angeles radio and television towers are now located just above the Hollywood sign – on Mt. Lee.
Today, some predict The End Is Near, with the End of Print, the End of Radio and the End of Television just around the corner. Or maybe it’s just version 2.0.
Recently, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Executive Order S-21-06 to expand broadband access in California, a vision of the state’s recently created Broadband Task Force. Larry Smarr is on it.
Meanwhile, Oregon’s Telecommunications Coordinating Council studies state-wide initiatives while Washington State Governor Chris Gregoire has Building Prosperity as her top priority.
The Ethernet Alliance today announced that the IEEE 802.3 Higher Speed Study Group (HSSG) voted to support 100 Gb/s as the next speed for Ethernet. In addition, the IEEE 802.3 HSSG also agreed to support reaches of at least 100 meters on multimode fiber and of at least 10km on single-mode fiber.
A 100 terabit network will inevitably interconnect the West Coast, running down Interstate 5.
Plan on it. Think RadioLab running on 1,000 Supercomputer Cells…in a thousand million years (MP3).
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Left by dailywireless.org » Samsung WiMAXing China? on December 21st, 2006