TV on Memory Lane
Recently I read a Buzzfeed listicle* about things people born since the 1980s won't remember. A few of the entries from the Reddit thread they scraped for the listicle ("listicle" is a portmanteau of list and article; it's a lazy writer's way of producing content) compared how watching TV used to be way different than it is today. I agree! I'm old enough to remember all the differences Buzzf- I mean Redditors- described, and then some. Here are Five Things:
1) Black & White TV. The first TV my parents had, or at least the one they had from when I was old enough to remember, at age 3 or 4, was a black-and-white set. It also wasn't terribly big, even by the time's standards. I think it was a 16" diagonal tube, but it could have been as small as 13". BTW, this was not back in the days when all TVs were B+W and tiny. My grandparents had a set that already looked ancient at the time, a TV in a big wooden console, that was larger and color. I think the issue was my parents just didn't watch a lot of TV so didn't value spending money on anything more than the cheapest possible set.
2) The Time Before Cable: So Few Channels. Before cable there were, like, 5 channels. We got the three major commercial networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), the city's PBS affiliate, and one local station. But actually we got two copies each of ABC, CBS, and NBC: our city's affiliates plus the affiliates from another city 80 miles away. We got those through this thing called Community Access TV, or CATV. You might've seen the CATV acronym from years ago and thought it meant "CAble TV". Not quite. It did involve a physical cable... but it was a cable network in our town that was connected to basically a big, shared antenna at the center of town so people didn't have to climb up on the roofs of their houses to strap individual antennas to their chimneys. (Note: years later so many people thought "CATV" meant CAble TV that cable equipment manufacturers appropriated the misunderstood acronym and it became a de facto standard.)
3) Early Cable: A Few Channels More. Having community access TV in our town made it easier to get real cable TV as the industry matured. Basically the CATV company became a Cable TV company, and we got more channels. Though only a few at first. Mostly they were big stations from more distant cities, like Atlanta's WTBS and Chicago's WGN, but there was also Nickelodeon- which was a big gain for us as kids. Though early on Nickelodeon was mostly reruns of American TV staples from 25 years earlier like Leave it to Beaver and Lassie, plus some Canadian and European imports that were kind of hit-or-miss.
4) Free Pay Channels- Briefly. One bonus, for a short while, was that you could watch premium channels like HBO for free- if you had the right TV. It depended on how the TV's tuner was built. Older TVs with chunky analog knobs could only to tune in to channels 2-13 in the VHF range. If they had a knob for higher number channels they shifted to the UHF range. With cable everything was transmitted win VHF range, with channels up into the 30s, 40s, and beyond. Newer TVs at the time with fully electronic tuning controls could select those channels. The cable company glommed on to that after a few years and killed it by scrambling the pay channels so you could only watch them with a descrambler box they provided when you subscribed. Though that led to the brief phenomenon of teens and tweens watching scrambled porn channels hoping to catch a brief glimpse of wavy boobs.
5) Be There or Miss It. The way most of us watch TV is so fundamentally different today from the 1980s. Nowadays with streaming TV we decide when we want to watch TV and pick something from a vast library of available content. In the long long ago there was no choosing your own schedule. If you wanted to watch show "X" you had to be watching when it aired. Like, if it was on Thursday at 8pm, you didn't get to watch it Saturday afternoon or binge-watch 3 episodes on Thursday 2 weeks later. You sat in front of your TV Thursday at 8 or you missed it. Good luck catching it on reruns... those could be months later, and often were shown out of order. VCRs became widely available in the 1980s and changed this equation somewhat, but IMO the quality of recordings and the ease of programming VCRs didn't reach a level of making them practical for routine viewing until around 1995.
1) Black & White TV. The first TV my parents had, or at least the one they had from when I was old enough to remember, at age 3 or 4, was a black-and-white set. It also wasn't terribly big, even by the time's standards. I think it was a 16" diagonal tube, but it could have been as small as 13". BTW, this was not back in the days when all TVs were B+W and tiny. My grandparents had a set that already looked ancient at the time, a TV in a big wooden console, that was larger and color. I think the issue was my parents just didn't watch a lot of TV so didn't value spending money on anything more than the cheapest possible set.
2) The Time Before Cable: So Few Channels. Before cable there were, like, 5 channels. We got the three major commercial networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), the city's PBS affiliate, and one local station. But actually we got two copies each of ABC, CBS, and NBC: our city's affiliates plus the affiliates from another city 80 miles away. We got those through this thing called Community Access TV, or CATV. You might've seen the CATV acronym from years ago and thought it meant "CAble TV". Not quite. It did involve a physical cable... but it was a cable network in our town that was connected to basically a big, shared antenna at the center of town so people didn't have to climb up on the roofs of their houses to strap individual antennas to their chimneys. (Note: years later so many people thought "CATV" meant CAble TV that cable equipment manufacturers appropriated the misunderstood acronym and it became a de facto standard.)
3) Early Cable: A Few Channels More. Having community access TV in our town made it easier to get real cable TV as the industry matured. Basically the CATV company became a Cable TV company, and we got more channels. Though only a few at first. Mostly they were big stations from more distant cities, like Atlanta's WTBS and Chicago's WGN, but there was also Nickelodeon- which was a big gain for us as kids. Though early on Nickelodeon was mostly reruns of American TV staples from 25 years earlier like Leave it to Beaver and Lassie, plus some Canadian and European imports that were kind of hit-or-miss.
4) Free Pay Channels- Briefly. One bonus, for a short while, was that you could watch premium channels like HBO for free- if you had the right TV. It depended on how the TV's tuner was built. Older TVs with chunky analog knobs could only to tune in to channels 2-13 in the VHF range. If they had a knob for higher number channels they shifted to the UHF range. With cable everything was transmitted win VHF range, with channels up into the 30s, 40s, and beyond. Newer TVs at the time with fully electronic tuning controls could select those channels. The cable company glommed on to that after a few years and killed it by scrambling the pay channels so you could only watch them with a descrambler box they provided when you subscribed. Though that led to the brief phenomenon of teens and tweens watching scrambled porn channels hoping to catch a brief glimpse of wavy boobs.
5) Be There or Miss It. The way most of us watch TV is so fundamentally different today from the 1980s. Nowadays with streaming TV we decide when we want to watch TV and pick something from a vast library of available content. In the long long ago there was no choosing your own schedule. If you wanted to watch show "X" you had to be watching when it aired. Like, if it was on Thursday at 8pm, you didn't get to watch it Saturday afternoon or binge-watch 3 episodes on Thursday 2 weeks later. You sat in front of your TV Thursday at 8 or you missed it. Good luck catching it on reruns... those could be months later, and often were shown out of order. VCRs became widely available in the 1980s and changed this equation somewhat, but IMO the quality of recordings and the ease of programming VCRs didn't reach a level of making them practical for routine viewing until around 1995.