Reminds me, I should go through my old box of DVDs and do some cleaning.
I am this many years old.Came here to post this.
I am this old as well but there’s a reason I always have a screwdriver handy
Oh ye with a weak thumbnail!
Came here to say the same
I have that exact model with my 2600!
crumbles into dust
I feel simultaneously seen and called out.
Before my time but I did run across these as a kid. Even played a few games, too.
We just had the twin lead wire coming from the antenna on the roof, through the wall, and hooked to the back of the TV. We didn’t get a color TV until I was about eight years old. My mom didn’t like the color, she thought they looked wrong, so we had black and white until she saw a Sony TV. (Early 70s)
The old B&W TV looked something like this:
This was our first VCR. I think this was the first digital clock we had in the house, too:
Whoa… Not flashing 12:00, check out Linus Torvalds here.
LOL. That’s not a picture of our actual VCR, just one of the same model.
But, my dad was an aircraft mechanic. He knew his way around tech well enough. Our clocks were always set correctly, as it happens.
Everything back then weighed 80-100lbs.
Except tvs, they weighed even more.
Who doesn’t know RCA? That’s left, right, and sub!
I’m “turn to channel 3” old…
Yeah but I had a knock off brans
But I just got comfortable!
Just be happy you don’t have to move the rabbit ears around till I get a good image
TVs had channels?
I’m old enough to remember Saturday morning cartoons, but seriously, it feels like TVs don’t really have channels anymore, and instead just have thousands of shitty streaming apps.
They still do if you use an antenna.
We forget how much TV was boring AF.
It’s been about 20 years since I watched cable/broadcast TV in my home. But yeah way back tvs didn’t have inputs for other devices, instead you had a box which you put in between the antenna or cable signal and your device which basically over wrote channel 3(why channel 3? I have no idea) with whatever your device was out putting. So if you wanted to play Nintendo you would change to channel 3 and see Mario or metroid.
It’s been a while since I’ve had to do a game system setup on an old TV, (like damn near 20 years) but I think you used channel 3 because it was a channel reserved for local communications, so there would never be “TV” on that channel. Your VCR connected to the TV with a coax cable, and if you wanted to have “TV” plugged in at the same time, you either needed a TV with multiple coax inputs (I think it was common to have 2, one for VCR, and one for satellite/aerial antenna) or a coax splitter. Early on, those RCA plugs weren’t built into a lot of TVs, so you needed the VCR to inject that signal onto coax for the TV. Lots (if not most/all) VCRs would let you switch the channel used in the settings, I think mainly to cover other regions where channel 3 was not standardized.
A local news station use(d? they are all digital now) channel 3, with both ota and cable. I remember using both 3 and (front) rca ‘input’ for my games.
I remember the coax cable but did not know about channel 3 being local communication. I thought it was just convention.
Thanks for teaching me.
You could feel the static charge shift when changing channels
Yeah which explains my hair in those days
Unless you were in Cleveland…then it was Channel 4.
Really? Interesting. We’re there other places or other channels like that? Like if you were in England or India did they do channel 3, channel 4, or something totally different?
Canada was either channel 3 or 4 depending on the device. Probably all American made then.
Was there a station that broadcast on channel 3? I remember TVs growing up often (always?) having support for both channels 3 and 4 as auxiliary inputs. Also, what happened to channels 1 and 2?
Channel 2 is KDKA CBS in Pittsburgh.
Ah, ok. I’m misremembering. It’s only channel one that didn’t exist. Just looked it up and apparently the FCC reallocated it in 1948 because it was causing interference with another use.
If I’m remembering right, channel 3 was all local ads when I was a kid. I think the only times I ever watched it were when I shut off whatever was using channel 3 and left the tv on.
I remember being so excited when my family got a box to convert composite cables to coaxial so they would work with our old TV. I got my friend to bring over his gamecube all the time until I finally got my own after a few months.
I see that and raise you computer programs you got from magazines you had to type in for an hour.
How did everyone have this exact bed‽
This is why I have chips out of my shins.
I once signed an apartment rental agreement that had a waterbed addendum, specifically banning their usage.
Weird. Me too and I was just thinking about that this morning.
Most of them banned it since they’d break and flash flood the building
I miss my waterbed
I miss your waterbed too.
Pretty sure I had that exact water bed frame
I’m this old.
But did you have separate VHF and UHF connectors on the back?
Separate nobs for UHF and VHF as well.
dude… i hooked up my sega master system II to my TV up the Antenna port with that little switch box.
This guy olds.
This. This is how old. OP needs to get off my lawn.
There it is!
Switch over for a quick round of Alex Kidd in Miracle World at my friend’s place. I found it so fascinating after manually switching cables between the antenna and Commodore 64 at home.
Same. Except Atari, and Nintendo too
Spectravideo and NES for me.
Same. Except generic Pong console.
That I played by myself and got it to bounce back and forth so I could go to the bathroom. Oh mine was legit Atari Pong.
I am SCART old
As a boy I had to stand up and walk to the TV to switch channel pressing buttons. No remote.
And then you pull too hard on the power button and it comes off and you get hit/yelled at by dad
Now that’s what I call a proper television
I had an old small tv like that in my bedroom. There was a dial for vhf and another for UHF. The two UHF channels we had were about 20 and 31, but I found if I dialed it all the way to 90 or so sometimes I could hear voices talking to each other. Usually just boring phone calls, I showed my friends once and we listened to my friends uncle on a call by chance, he recognised the voice and the people he was talking about.
Then they switched mobile phones to a digital signal.
Landline portable antenna phones had some prettybad channel bleed, esp if you live in an apt complex with a local Walmart - bunch of phones would all be the same cheapo Panasonic (or whatever) model and we’d hear someone pretty often if you stand in the right spot.
My TV only had 4 button for 4 channels so once we got more than 4 channels we had to use a small wheel to change frequencies and look for them.
That’s a new one to me. Great Britain, I assume.
I was the “go find the pliers to turn the channel, cause the knob went missing last year” kid.
Just kept the small vice grip clamped on it.
You were supposed to sit close enough to the tv to always reach it.
Yellow is video. White is left channel audio. Red is right channel audio.
I’m quite a bit older than those
Yes.
In this old
SCART is newer than composite, though…
Didn’t say they were the oldest, just that they are that old
