I am this old.
I totally saw a boob!
I am black and white TV, no VCR invented yet old.
I do not miss these. The RCA wires were so frail on most consoles. At least you could repair cables with spare parts from Radio Shack back then.
Reminds me, I should go through my old box of DVDs and do some cleaning.
Everyone saying they are older than these, but composite video dates back to the 1950s.
I am this many years old.My brother/sister thank you, that takes me back. Had the og Nintendo going through that
This was the only thing station included up till and including the fucking Jaguar.
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!
I feel simultaneously seen and called out.
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.
Came here to say the same
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 am SCART old
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
Anymore.
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.
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.
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 this old.
But did you have separate VHF and UHF connectors on the back?
Separate nobs for UHF and VHF as well.
I believe there was a toggle switch on set controls (no remote).
How did everyone have this exact bed‽
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This was the era of robber barons, not long after this the US actually did something about these people, including some of the best progressive tax rates the US probably ever saw.
For example in 1951 if you had an income of $400,000, every dollar you made beyond that was taxed at 91%. That doesn’t necessarily mean they paid that much, but they paid a lot more than they do nowadays.
Maybe 30 years after our first trillionaire will get our s*** together again, or maybe not.
“Now I know!”
“And knowing is half the battle!”
