Just today, a friend was basking in her physical prowess: being able to dismount, move and remount her 55-inch flat panel television all by herself, a skill that she attributes to her dedication to weightlifting.

While there’s nothing wrong with that, and I had no desire to burst her bubble, it made me reminisce about the old days, the days when TVs were REALLY HEAVY!

Back then, a 50-inch CRT rear projection TV weighed at least 200lbs. That’s not impossibly heavy, but the fact that they were fragile, and the guns needed to be recalibrated every time you moved the damn thing made moving them a chore.

It wasn’t just how heavy they were; they were big, too. The CRT RPTVs could be as much as three feet deep, front to back.

I have more than a few memories of customers who purchased a 60-inch RPTV, only to find out that they hadn’t measured to see if it would fit through their front door, or down the stairs, or around the L-shaped bend in their hallway.

I still remember 2000 – 2001, when Hitachi debuted a line of HD RPTVs that allowed delivery guys to dismantle the screen cabinet above from the CRT guns/electronics below to make installation easier. That was seen as progress.

It wasn’t just the big screens that were heavy, it was tube TVs, too. The 40-inch Sony XBR Wega CRT TV weighed nearly 400lbs. And the more commonlysold 36-inch XBR tube TVs were still nearly 300lbs.

One week at the store I used to manage, the delivery company we had contracted had eight Saturday afternoon deliveries: all 36-inchXBRs, and all of them to second and third story walk-up apartments.

That Monday the owner of the delivery company (really, he was just a guy with a truck and a helper) called me and said “I quit.”