Hal on advertising and the fall of the Networks (pp. 417–418)
and of the digital-compatible patents to the still-needing-to-come-down-in-price-a-little technology of HDTV’s visually enhanced color monitor with microprocessed circuitry and more lines of optical resolution
Context
The screen's third catalogued phrase: InterLace's victory itemized as optics acquisitions — "more lines of optical resolution," plus the "mimetic-resolution cartridge-view motherboards" of the new Teleputers a sentence later. The home viewer's endpoint hardware is specced in lens- grade vocabulary just as the cartridge economy that will deliver the Entertainment locks into place. And embedded in the same paragraph-block is the scene's one videophony touch: Sprint "went belly-up trying to launch a primitively naked early mask- and Tableauxless form of videophony" — "naked" because maskless, the camera pointed back at the caller with nothing interposed, a compressed echo of the full videophony essay's camera-dread (scene 047's catalogued mirror sighting). Resolution climbing on the receiving end, the transmitting camera already intolerable without masks: the scene's optics run one-way, toward spectation and away from being seen.