tesla radio prague
1 month ago
Published May 27, 2022 by

Postcard from Prague

Before there was Musk, there was state-run Tesla Radio.

From Wikipedia:

The company had a wide range of production: TVs, radio receivers, transistors, integrated circuits, screens, speakers, gramophones, cassette recorders, CD players, videocassette recorders etc. However, quantity usually did not meet the needs of industrial customers and many products gradually became obsolete simply because they were not updated; e.g. one particular type of diode was manufactured for over 30 years without modifications.

My take: The 23 years of Soviet occupation are not forgotten.

Prague (native population 1.3 million) hasn’t returned to its pre-pandemic record of 9.8 million foreign tourists, but it must be getting close. The country has accepted 330,000 Ukrainian refugees — drop in the cosmopolitan bucket.

Below: View from Prague Castle. Shot on iPhone.

4 Comments

  1. Horace Dediu said:
    Tesla was not founded by Elon Musk. The company (and its name) were created by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in July 2003. Incidentally, the startup capital was available because Eberhard and Tarpenning founded NuvoMedia, which developed the Rocket eBook, the first e-book with secure internet delivery of content. NuvoMedia’s was acquired by Gemstar in 2000. I met the CTO of NuvoMedia when we both served on the Open Ebook Foundation creating OEB which became EPUB, the standard in use for ebooks today, including those on Apple Books. Tesla has as much to do with the humble eBook as it does with Elon Musk, who came with series A financing a year after founding.

    8
    May 27, 2022
  2. David Gleason said:
    Hmm.. 23 years after 1945 was 1968 — that’s the year the Russians sent the tanks back into Prague to crush the Prague Spring. When I was there in the 1977, I was “detained” for joining some Czechs on an official outing that brought us too close to Russian troops stationed near Znojmo. They figured I had to be CIA (I was still a student). Good to remember why so many Eastern European countries begged to get into NATO: they used to have a prominent memorial in Prague to the Soviet tank that first liberated it from the Nazis — is it still there? Or did they remove it?

    1
    May 27, 2022
    • Robert Stack said:
      Re “they used to have a prominent memorial in Prague to the Soviet tank that first liberated it from the Nazis — is it still there? Or did they remove it?”

      I believe it was towed away by some unknown Ukrainian farmer with his tractor… 🙂

      1
      May 27, 2022

Leave a Reply