A TV repair man would come to your house to keep your TV running for as long as possible.
Because when something went wrong, it was usually a part that could be replaced for $20 including labor - much cheaper than replacing the set. These days, there's not much in there - a small PC board and a few components. When something goes bad you can't obtain a replacement part (because it's not a generic one, like a vacuum tube or a capacitor, it's a part obtainable only from the TV manufacturer, and they don't sell the parts), and a new set costs much less in 2003 dollars than having the repairman come to the house cost in 1960 dollars. (In 1960, $45/week was enough to support a family nicely, so a repair cost about half a week's income. Today you can buy a good set for $200, while it takes more than $400/week to support a family.)
And color TV was a long time in coming. There were a lot of half assed attempts to make it work at first. Yeah, they had colors, but Ed Sullivan might have green skin or bright fuzzy pink.
Blue grass and orange dirt at baseball games too.
They messed with the concept for a long time.
Sort of. At the same time that RCA came out with dot-sequential color (the system in use today), CBS came out with field-sequential color (and Sony later came out with a field-sequential set that had a dot-sequential to field-sequential converter in it) that worked a lot better. (With a color wheel instead of a color tube, you got perfect color every time.) With computers (that's why we have pretty good color these days - there's a computer in the TV set), field-sequential would look even better and the circuitry would be simpler (and probably cheaper).
We get what the big dog invented, not the best system. FM stereo still has limited channel separation. There was another method that had much greater separation, and held up even in a car moving through a city at a fair clip (which almost totally destroys the separation in the current system). But GE had the money.
Anyone familiar with the external combustion engine?
As far as technological advance, the speed at which technology is advancing is, itself, accelerating. Technological advance is a second-order (maybe even a third-order) effect. It's always been that way. Technology advanced more from 1900 to 2000 than it had from 1500 to 1900. Anyone alive now, who lives until 2100, and looks back, will probably see more advance in this century than in the past 10 centuries (or more). It probably took tens of thousands of years to go from using fire to making it. Today, the equivalent probably takes a few months. I wish I could live to see what 2100 will bring. Or even 2050.