I remember first watching TV at home in Holland during the very early 60s. Yet here I am today on Nostr, owning Bitcoin and despising main stream TV. Cool huh? Copied/pasted the following from “The Dutch Archeologist” on Facebook via Google search (I’m not active on FB, only Nostr): On the evening of 2 October 1951, a new era quietly began in the Netherlands. At 8:15 p.m., the first official national Dutch television broadcast started from Studio Irene in Bussum. There was only one problem. Almost nobody owned a television. The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision records that there were roughly 500 television sets in the entire country at the time. State Secretary Jo Cals and NTS chairman Professor J.B. Kors opened the broadcast. Viewers then saw programming including music and a television play called De Toverspiegel—The Magic Mirror. Appropriately, the play was about television itself. The new medium was presented almost like science fiction: a device capable of bringing distant people, events and worlds directly into the home. The actual moving television images from that first evening have not survived. Photographs remain, along with audio recordings of the opening speeches. Television spread quickly afterward. Sets appeared in cafés and shop windows before becoming common in Dutch living rooms. Neighbours who did not own one might visit somebody who did. Within a generation, something that only a few hundred Dutch households could experience had become one of the central features of everyday life. The strange part is how recent that transformation was. In 1951, nationwide Dutch television did not begin with millions watching. It began with only hundreds of screens.
