Daddy's Home by Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein for November 16, 2021

And we had only 3 channels to watch!! Four, if there was a local PBS station in your area!!

:-(

Yea kids have no idea what it was like back then. When the kid was the remote.

I remember in my childhood the family having a small TV set having a channels changing knob; I think it was 13 channels thereon.

Our first TV really did have doors. It also had a radio and a record player* built into the same cabinet. (*We didn’t call them turntables in those days.)

When I was a kid, we had two English channels and one scrambled French channel. Sometime we would watch the scrambled channel to maybe catch a glimpse of nudity.

Tony asked, about 9 hours ago

Remember?

Yes. And even the times when it was all black and white.

Just how old is Peter? We had a remote controlled TV back in the ’70’s, nearly 50 years ago. Certain sounds would turn the TV on and off, change the channel, etc… The remote only had 4 buttons, but still, it was a remote. And if we happened to lose it temporarily we just pulled out the car keys.

Years ago I had a TV set with channel 1. And push-button for each channel.

Not only did ours have knobs, it had hobbs!

https://johneaves.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/johns-test-pattern.jpg

And don’t forget sometimes you had to “fine tune” the channel by adjusting with the outer “ring” of the knob. At least I had to.

The television was in a fine furniture cabinet with a door to hide the knobs.

In my youth we had 3 channels that were pretty good. Today we have 3000 or 30,000 channels , whatever. However, we don’t have 3 channels out of those 3000 that are pretty good. Go figure…..

on a related note: the first time I saw ‘The Apartment’ (1960) and Jack uses a remote control to change his tv from oater to oater to oater to … I was stunned. I’d never seen any kind of TV remote control before.

The stations finally got smart, they don’t say “Don’t touch that dial” anymore. It was confusing too many people.

First TV I remember was a big old Zenith black and white with vacuum tubes. Every now and then it would go wonky and my dad would take the tubes up to the tube tester at the hardware store to find the bad one and replace it. I loved going with him to do those things.