Open Sesame

I'm a little too old to have been affected by the television content of Sesame Street. It must have played in the house when my sister was small. Or perhaps, we used to watch it in the dorms at college. I'd say it's fairly safe to assume that most folks have heard of the Cookie Monster or Bert and Ernie. The show affected countless people. In fact, I remember finding it fascinating to see an Arabic-language, localized Iftah Ya Simsim co-production on Kuwaiti television in the early 1980's.

 

The only reason I'm bringing this up is I recently spotted the series on the PBS HD network lineup. It seems that everything, except the local CTV news, has gone high definition.

Technology changes but things do tend to repeat. I grew up with TV but remember the first sets in our house as being bulky boxes with many tubes. Importantly, they only showed black and white. We had relatives who must have had one of the first colour sets I can recall watching. I remember my father in the mid-1960s remarking how quickly things were changing. He was amazed that even the news program had, at the time, begun being broadcast in colour. Remember, that's when most viewers were seeing NBC's peacock in lovely shades of grey.

Now four decades later, I marvel that even Sesame Street is available in high-definition! In the 2040s will people be installing some type of interactive holographic receivers?