Comment by zwischenzug

Whatever we all television now, television then was literally "vision at a distance", which Baird was the first to demonstrate (AFAIK).

The TV I have now in my living room is closer to a computer than a television from when I grew up (born 1975) anyway, so the word could mean all sorts of things. I mean, we still call our pocket computers "phones" even though they are mainly used for viewing cats at a distance.