Who doesn’t know RCA? That’s left, right, and sub!
I am this many years old.I am this old as well but there’s a reason I always have a screwdriver handy
Oh ye with a weak thumbnail!
I feel simultaneously seen and called out.
Came here to say the same
I have that exact model with my 2600!
crumbles into dust
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.
I am SCART old
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.
I’m “turn to channel 3” old…
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.
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.
I could be wrong, but I think that was what the convention was in the US at least.
Similar to how there is nothing “stopping” a web server from having a 192.168.x.x address, but we have a standard that blocks off those addresses to be used inside of your own network.
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.
Yes.
Just came across a bunch of composite cables in a bin I was going through as I’m moving. I’ve got way too much of this kind of stuff that I need to get rid of. I hate moving.
You know how you think it’s better to keep them, just in case?
It is.
Weird obscure cable you haven’t used in 10 years?
Guaranteed to need it 7 days after getting rid of it
Oh a simpler time. When nothing needed to update, billion/trillionaires didn’t exist, and no one was trying to steal every normal of your data to rip you off and con you politically. I miss riding bikes till the street lights came on.
Rockefeller became the country’s first billionaire on 28 September 1916
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller
Remember the warm glow of the yellow/orange street lights? There gone now too, just like the hummingbirds and the fireflies.
Why did you have to shatter the small bit of perceived relief I had!!??
Thought you might want to know. Information is power.
100%. It is always better to know. I think that’s what draws us all to this place.
At the same time, fuuuuuck man. 😔
I think capitalism is humanities terminal illness.
So much potential wasted.
“Now I know!”
“And knowing is half the battle!”
I’m this old.
But did you have separate VHF and UHF connectors on the back?
I believe there was a toggle switch on set controls (no remote).
This is why I have chips out of my shins.
I miss my waterbed
I miss your waterbed too.
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
Pretty sure I had that exact water bed frame
Yellow is video. White is left channel audio. Red is right channel audio.
dude… i hooked up my sega master system II to my TV up the Antenna port with that little switch box.
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.
This guy olds.
This. This is how old. OP needs to get off my lawn.
There it is!
Same. Except Atari, and Nintendo too
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.
Spectravideo and NES for me.
I’m quite a bit older than those
As a boy I had to stand up and walk to the TV to switch channel pressing buttons. No remote.
Yo my dad would lay on the couch after work and scream for me or my brother to come change the channel. Those were the fucking days…
And then you pull too hard on the power button and it comes off and you get hit/yelled at by dad
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.
Now that’s what I call a proper television
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.
You were supposed to sit close enough to the tv to always reach it.
