ONE OF MY HOBBIES IS FOLLOWING THE RESTORATION OF VINTAGE TELEVISIONS AND ELECTRONICS. If I had an actual house rather than my tiny studio apartment, the garage would be my workshop, and it would be stuffed with color televisions of 1960s and early ’70s vintage, in various states of disassembly and repair.

Part of the appeal is nostalgia. I remember when having a color television, especially one of those big Zenith floor models that were mounted in hardwood cabinets in a variety of styles, was something only relatively prosperous people could aspire to, while the rest of us made do with black-and-white sets. Same with stereos — a company called Fisher made big “console” stereos that retailed, adjusted for inflation, at $21,000 or more.

Part of it, too, is that I can now afford items that, when new, were far out of reach, but can now be picked up at an estate sale for pennies on the dollar. A friend of mine recently picked up one of those old Fisher console stereos, practically in mint condition, for $35. The sound from those old consoles would give a high-end contemporary system a run for its money.

The idea of getting a luxury item for almost nothing appeals to a frugality I probably got from my Depression-era parents. But there is something more.

In the 1950s and ’60s, supremacy in the television market was primarily a contest between two American corporations: RCA and Zenith. RCA basically invented color television in the ’50s, and well into the ’60s most non-RCA televisions were basically copies of RCA designs. Pull the back off any color television built up to about 1969 and you will see components that, in their arrangement and design, are virtually indistinguishable from RCA components.

“RCA” was an acronym for Radio Corporation of America, and from the 1920s through the ’60s it dominated the home electronics industry in the U.S. Its offices and research and production facilities occupied a vast complex of buildings in Camden, N.J., and its total staff ran into the tens of thousands. RCA was a premium blue chip stock, one of the foundations of a good investment portfolio. It was like Apple, Microsoft and Google rolled into one.

RCA’s main rival during its prime years was the Zenith Corporation, based in and around Chicago. Where RCA set the standard when it came to innovation and research, Zenith carved out a reputation as the quality brand — its motto was “The quality goes in before the name goes on!” Zenith products from the ’60s — particularly its televisions, which were completely hand-built — are highly prized by savvy collectors. The color quality and image crispness on an electronically restored Zenith of that vintage rivals that of even a contemporary plasma television.

Both corporations are now defunct, killed in part by competition from Japan and (later) Korea, but also by stupid and short-sighted management decisions. Zenith actually invented high-definition television technology, but then did nothing with it. A similar situation obtains with another once-dominant American company, Kodak, which invented digital photography, then sat on it because it represented a threat to its lucrative film business.

RCA, meanwhile, went along with the fad of becoming highly diversified “conglomerates” that seized American corporations in the 1960s and ’70s, transforming itself from a highly competent electronics manufacturer to an unwieldy and complex entity that did many things, but none with the skill that characterized its historical, core businesses.

Zenith lasted a bit longer than RCA, but it never made the leap to making lower-end but still high-quality televisions that were the signature of Japanese electronics companies like Sony and Panasonic.

I’m enough of a patriot to mourn the passing of those iconic American companies, and I also mourn the disappearance of the deservedly well-paid jobs of the production workers who spent decades manufacturing those high-quality products.

I also worry for the future of contemporary American companies like Apple. While their phones and tablets are still relatively dominant in the U.S., they are steadily losing market share in Europe and Asia to Samsung and other Korean electronics giants, and I sense that the time is not far off when the U.S. market, too, may begin to slip through their fingers.

How do Asian electronics companies keep beating us? I think part of the answer is that they take a different approach to investment than American companies. While their companies have shareholders like ours do, it is also true that successful Asian companies do not have relentless pressure from shareholders to maximize immediate returns, and thus can more easily forgo short-term profits to make investments that will pay off not in a year or two, but further down the road. They are constantly thinking in 5-, 10-, and even 20-year increments, setting goals in those time frames and deciding how best to get there.

I think it’s time for American companies to begin thinking more in those terms, and public policy can be a vital support for that transformation. More on that in next week’s column.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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