A TV set with tubes? WOW! You mean like the RCA that my dad brought home one day. Did yours have a ROUND screen? A real wood cabinet? Did the TV repair guy have to come by every two or three months with his caddy full of tubes? One where all the controls were ON THE SET: no remote. You had to get up to change the channel or volume. You had to adjust the VERTICAL and the HORIZONTAL from time to time or if you changed the channel. Well, when your city finally got a second channel, that is?
Well, I went through all that. Oh, and then there was the Howdy Doody show. In black and white, of course.
Then I got a job in TV and met tube type TV transmitters. Now I was the guy changing the tubes. We pulled each and every one of them on a weekly basis and measured their gain with a tube tester. It was graphed and when the line took a down turn by 5 or 10 percent, out it went. That's how you keep a transmitter with 50 or 75 tubes on the air with only rare outages while in use. And for those rare outages you had a second transmitter with the filaments kept powered up and ready to go at the press of a couple of "Plates" buttons. And it had another 50 to 75 tubes that also had to be tested weekly. The midnight shift guy got that job. Guess who!
At one station the tube salesman came around every six or eight weeks to be sure we were happy with his company's tubes and service. He always bought a nice lunch for me and my assistant at a beach front restaurant/bar in Ft Lauderdale.
And the TV cameras. They were originally a nightmare of tubes. When color came along, it was even worse. You could start a show with three cameras that, after an hour or two of work, were fairly well matched in color. But a half hour later one was green, another purple, and the third blue. And you had to correct them on the fly. TUBES!
I was never so happy as when the 2Ns took over. I suspect the design engineers were the same.
I have seen even a TV set with tubes (not only the CRT), transistors, ICs and varicaps ... No leds still, it had incandescent lamps.