Though a last-minute exten­sion recently pushed the legal dead­line into June, for much of the coun­try, ana­log tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ing ended today.

Peo­ple today under­es­ti­mate the tech­no­log­i­cal bril­liance of the NTSC color tele­vi­sion sys­tem. At the time of its inven­tion in 1953, it was clear that for a color tele­vi­sion stan­dard to survive—there were sev­eral com­pet­ing pro­pri­etary sys­tems being tested—it had to be backwards-compatible with the installed base of black-and-white sets. A sys­tem that allowed color infor­ma­tion to peace­fully coex­ist with a black-and-white pic­ture was an incred­i­ble trick of engi­neer­ing. And the fact that we’re finally get­ting around to replac­ing it after 56 years is a tes­ta­ment to its quality.

Thanks to my very brief tele­vi­sion career, I have sur­pris­ingly fond mem­o­ries of wave­form mon­i­tors, vec­torscopes, and color subcarriers—things that future gen­er­a­tions will regard as mere curiosi­ties. Pic­tured here is a RF patch panel at the out­put of WKRC-TV’s dual redun­dant Har­ris tube-based trans­mit­ters. Cop­per drain pipe? Hardly! What you see here is nitrogen-pressurized coax­ial cable car­ry­ing 316,000 watts of RF power (ERP, actu­ally) at 204-210 MHz. It’s a sick­en­ing amount of power, and from where I took this pic­ture one could seem­ingly sense the energy in his body.