I'm reaching the age where people don't believe that the things I vaguely remember from my childhood ever existed.
Please reply if you have ever seen one of these in real life:
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Not only saw them. Used them to fix the radio and TV. If the TV didn't work. "It was probably a tube." And dad would open the back of the set and unplug all 5 or 6 tubes. We'd carry them to the hardware store in a paper bag and use the tube tester to figure out which one was blown. Buy the replacement. Head back home full of hope, and replace all the tubes plus the shiney new tube. Invariably it worked and the TV fired right up. Howdy Doody!
Dang, we never had a TV console made out of wood!
An actual user! Or at least the son of an actual user.
Actually the first thing to do was to pull all the tubes and plug them back in. The most likely thing was a loose or intermittent connection on one of the pins. If that didn't work it was off to the hardware store tube tester.
That's also why people would hit their sets to jiggle the connections.
Another fun old electronics story from the 1970s. Had a Kenwood 6006 amplifier. It stopped working, so took it to the stereo repair place. The guy determined it was a capacitor which he replaced. It worked for a week and failed again, so took it back. Guy said probably a bad lot of capacitors and replaced all 20 of the same ones. The amp is still working today.
I remember when people used to get the drive chain on their cars replaced at like 120k miles no matter what, because that's about how long they'd last and having them fail on the road was really bad.
I am slowly learning that capacitors are the timing chain of electronics: after X years, if you've got the device open just automatically replace them - the odds of them failing are pretty high.
aka "kinetic repair" 😁