[QUOTE=NajaNivea]
I think you’ve got this exactly backwards. My parents had a big, free-standing console TV that lived for approximately fifteen years. I had a TV bought in the mid-nineties that lasted through high school and college and just died about two years ago. We went to buy a new TV for our upstairs bedroom when we bought this house and were told by all and sundry that we could expect new TV purchases to last a handful of years at best; that because electronics were so cheap to produce, electronics companies nowadays care absolutely least of all about longevity and are entirely reliant on high turnover for profit. We bought the new TV after a fair amount of research on which standard TV would last the longest. It’s been about four years, and the picture on it is so dark, that unless the scene takes place in broad daylight in the center of the Mojave desert, you can’t actually see much of anything. We’ve been trying to watch Rome, but the whole thing appears to be lit with exactly two flickering torches, and mostly all we get is the audio with a few glimpses of togas.
You used to be able to have TVs repaired because there were people who knew how to do it, and enough people with reparable TVs that would pay to keep their set running. Now, it’s cheaper to toss the thing in a landfill and buy a new one for under a hundred bucks than it is to pay someone to fix it. Same with stereos and such. The CD deck in my car died one day and the only two places I could find willing to even look at it wanted to charge me $250 just to look with no guarantee of a fix or even that they’d do anything to attempt to repair it. Both advised me I’d be better off replacing the whole thing, deck and header.
I thought this sounded completely asinine, so I poked around on the 'net with a description of the problem, and almost immediately found an electronics forum with a five-year-old thread detailing this exact issue and the mechanical fix. I opened the stupid thing up, poked around with a flathead screwdriver to realign one small set of plastic cogs, screwed the box back together, and et voilà: working CD deck, and I didn’t even bill myself for the $250.
I am quite sure the technology exists to make a TV that will last a good decade or more. I am also quite sure that nothing I’m going to be able to purchase on the shelf in Target’s electronic department is going to be built with longevity in mind.
[/QUOTE]
I’m old enough to remember when every drugstore had a tube tester kiosk. You brought in the tube you thought was faulty and tested it. If it was bad, you looked for the number, went to the storage compartment full of replacement tubes, and bought a new one. (Or went home and brought in another tube, or a handful of them, or went around to ten more places because they didn’t have the exact tube you needed.)
There were also television repair shops filled with sets to the ceiling that were either being repaired for more extensive problems or had been abandoned by the owners and were looking for someone to buy them cheap.
Sets of the day were not at all reliable in the way we think of them now. Getting a good picture at any moment was a matter of luck and timing. Some repairs were easy and quick, true, but most meant hauling the extremely heavy set to a shop and leaving it there for weeks or else living with a poor quality picture.
Nobody would put up with this nonsense for a minute these days. We want our sets to have perfect pictures all the time from the moment we buy them till the day we replace them with a better technology. Manufacturers gear their technology to this expectation. A set is not repairable by an individual because it it all electronic and computer circuitry. But these are a thousand times more reliable than vacuum tubes. As someone said, if they fail then the whole set stops dead rather than the image being degraded, but that’s the trade-off and it’s the trade-off that 99% of consumers are more than willing to make.
When I first started buying cars in the 1970s, I got a AAA membership because the cars were always breaking down. I used to get flat tires regularly. Neither has happened to me in a decade or more. I can’t take the car to the corner gas station for repairs, and repairs are more expensive when they are needed, but that’s a trade-off that is vastly to my benefit almost all of the time.
It’s notable that nobody in this thread has come up with an actual example of a good technology being repressed, just “stories” that they’ve heard. I don’t believe that any good technology can be repressed.
I do believe that a possible technology can be rejected because it won’t meet market standards, being too expensive or too restrictive or specialized to get a mass market or too finicky to survive outside of the laboratory. That last bit happens all the time. Read any issue of Popular Science or a similar magazine for the last 50 years and you’ll find an article on the next wonder technology that never happened because it didn’t work in the real world with real customers.
Take it from somebody who remembers the 50s. Technology is infinitely, unbelievably, thoroughly better today than it was in that supposed golden age. You wouldn’t want to live there.
Celebrate the now. 
Which, while great for me, did Corning no good whatsoever.