My son, Max, was watching an episode of the Netflix series “Stranger Things” the other evening and he said to me, with the bemused pity for adults at which 11-year-old boys excel, that “TVs sure were small back then.”

To an 11-year-old, “back then” isn’t necessarily ancient, of course.

For Max and his sister Olivia, who’s 15, a world without smartphones and streaming services such as Netflix, which offer instant gratification for our every entertainment demand, is inconceivable.

But this episode of “Stranger Things” was set in 1984.

As I contemplated that year, which is when I turned 14 and started high school, it struck me that for my kids the early 1980s are about as distant, and thus equally strange, as World War II was to me.

My recollection of 1984 is murky at best, a collage of faces and places and events marred by the cataract-like film that the passage of the decades inevitably forms.

I suspect, though, that if as a teenager I ever contemplated living without a Sony Walkman, or without telephones that weren’t on a party line (but which were, like untrustworthy dogs, forever tied to a leash), I probably felt rather as Max and Olivia do when they watch accurately depicted scenes from 1984.

And “Stranger Things” seemed to pull off that time-traveling trick pretty deftly.

The televisions that caught Max’s attention were appropriate for the era. This is the type of TV anyone older than, say, 25, remembers. Because these sets incorporated a cathode-ray tube (also known as a “picture tube”) and a glass screen, they were both heavier, but also usually smaller, than the flat-screen LCD models that have, in less than a generation, rendered completely obsolete the tube technology that had dominated for more than half a century.

Max’s comment reminded me of something I had thought about occasionally over the past several years, but always briefly.

This time I pondered the matter a bit more thoroughly and I realized, with newfound clarity, just how dramatically TVs have changed in a relatively short span.

Which is no minor trend, given the ubiquity, and popularity, of TVs.

I can’t say for certain, but as near as I can figure there hasn’t been a tube TV in my house for about a decade.

I don’t recall the last time I was in a home or business that had anything but a flat-screen.

The advantages of LCD and related technology (there is, as always with consumer electronics, a bewildering array of abbreviations and acronyms) are so obvious that its predominance seems today inevitable.

Besides being able to display high-definition images, flat-screen TVs, because they lack the tube and glass screen, can be built with comparatively immense screens while still being much lighter.

Prior to the proliferation of LCDs, the biggest TV I ever owned had a 29-inch screen. And although I don’t have the specifications at hand, I suspect it weighed close to twice as much as the 50-inch model that hangs on my living room wall now and which renders sporting events with such clarity and size that I feel as though I could reach out and grab the basketball.

Speaking of walls, unless you were in a hospital room you didn’t mount a tube TV that way.

Besides their heft, which could snap a typical home wall stud (not to mention various vertebrae if you tried to hoist the thing up there), tube TVs are thick, making it impossible to place them close to the wall. Flat-screens, by contrast, fit almost flush, like a framed painting or photograph.

My dad, who typically rides the crest of technological waves (he bought a flat-screen TV years before I did), brought home a TV once that was, I think, the apex of tube technology in the 1980s.

I don’t recall the screen size but it certainly was smaller than what you’ll find in the majority of homes today — my 50-inch model, which I bought earlier this year to replace a 40-incher, is probably punier than average these days.

What I do remember is that my dad’s TV, which was enclosed in a cabinet crafted from real wood, was a piece of furniture in addition to an entertainment device.

I also remember that it nearly killed several members of the family tasked with moving it into my parents’ new home in Salem in 1992.

When that TV came to rest on its stand — itself a formidable piece — seismologists noted that the pens on their monitors skittered across the paper.

I like to believe they still talk about the anomalous quake of ’92 centered in South Salem.