@Bluefreedom , you have no idea. You can see sets like this at the Henry Ford Museum near Detroit. In the early days of TV, they could not manufacture rectangular CRTs, so the screens looked like they do here. The one Uncle John built had a smaller screen than the DuMont shown in the picture, and the cabinet was made out of CDX plywood with a coat of dark stain. We eventually replaced it with a 14” Philco, but it was still full of tubes. You didn’t see transistors used in TV sets until the mid-1960s.
I’m not only old enough to remember these sets, I’m old enough to have worked on them. The first color TV I owned, I bought in 1975 from a guy who was basically throwing it out. It was around 10 years old when I got it. The tuner was transistorized, but most of the chassis was vacuum tubes. It needed a focus coil, which I replaced, and some new potentiometers. I used it for around 4 years, and it still worked when I gave it away. If you didn’t want to watch TV on it, it made a pretty good space heater.