I remember certain shows having a little announcement tacked on to their titles. “Rat Patrol! In Color!” A little reminder to those watching on B&W TVs. I would think about it when stereo first became available and they’d show that little notice at the bottom of the screen during the opening of a show, “In stereo, where available.”
Originally, every show in color had a special announcement in the beginning; best known is the NBC Peacock, but CBS and ABC had them, too. The Peacock ran about 15 seconds.
ABC’s ran about ten seconds. Around 1966, they switched to a shorter version – maybe three seconds --and used the extra time, plus cutting a bit out of each show to squeeze in another ad. The other networks followed suit.
Yeah, fireworks around the castle, or something like it.
My Father was an engineer at the NBC affiliate. Now I see why all the monitors were RCA, and why Dad bought RCA. 
I vaguely remember our family getting a color set around 1969.
As for my personally, I was in college in the early 1980s, and affordable “small” color TVs didn’t really exist until 1983 or so. (“In my day,” not only did the dorm rooms not have cable TV outlets (we were stuck with whatever the antenna picked up), but the rooms still had rotary dial phones in them.)
Side question: while CBS (briefly) and NBC (for something like a decade, with its peacock logo) had a single “In Color” message for its shows, ABC let each show make its own. Which one(s) do you still remember? The only one I remember “from the day” was Spider-Man, although some of the others still appear when aired in syndication.
Our family got our first color TV in 1970, when our grandmother died. (We inherited hers, obviously.)
When I got my first job and apartment in 1982, I bought a 13" B&W set new for $79. Color sets at the time were about $200 or so, so I cheaped out.
My family was another late adopter, in the early '80s. We had a microwave oven, central air conditioning, and two (or three) B&W televisions before we had a color TV! We knew our priorities. It took us a long time to get a VCR, and we never did have cable. I still don’t. 
As to repairs, I remember (again, from the early '80s) a “tube tester” near the entrance of the Walgreens at the local mall. It had an ungodly number of sockets because – like cell phone chargers 
– nobody felt a need to standardize them! :rolleyes: Our sets were all too modern for that, but I presume it catered to the (even more) diehard souls who didn’t cotton to that new-fangled solid-state technology. 
I don’t think it was so much “a need to standardize them” as it was that different tubes had different purposes - you don’t test, say, an NPN transistor the same way you test a PNP one.
Tubes with different uses have different socket configurations. A diode, for example, has more than an amplifier, and can be smaller, letting a smaller socket take up less room. More powerful tubes are larger, and require a larger socket.
They still do that. CG animation is great for making an HDTV look at its best.
Umm, they were standardized. Which is why tube testers were even possible. (I still own one. And I’m far from the only Doper that does.) Keep in mind that tubes were common from the 1920s into the 1960s. In the 1940s, a lot of tubes were octals and then the miniatures become the most common. So two socket sizes covered almost all tubes. But, as mentioned, the internal wiring of the tubes differed so tube testers might need different sockets of the same size to handle that (depending on the complexity of the switches). With TVs, certain tubes were very specialized and would be larger than minis. You might even have an HV tube with a cap connector.
There were even tube substitution manuals where if you didn’t have exactly a given tube around, it would tell you which other tube, maybe by a different maker, would do in a pinch. Things were that standardized.
As to memories of first color TV: We got our first one extremely late in the game. One of the last families on the street. The galling thing was that my step-father co-owned a TV-Stereo shop and sold color TVs for a living. They even had used fixer-upper sets in the back of the shop just sitting there. And when we finally did get one, it was the crappy 3rd level but overpriced brand that he sold, not a regular halfway decent quality brand.
When I bought my own color TV, it was a Toshiba that just plain lasted and lasted. It’s amazing how long a well taken care of piece of electronics from the 70s would last. Not the throwaway junk sold now.
I think ICs are responsible for that. When entire amps are in a chip and the chips are soldered by machine into circuit traces that are too tiny to repair, there isn’t much left to fix. Adding sockets for the chips adds cost to the product.
Hence replacing the motherboard when the power socket of a laptop comes loose.
We got our color TV sometime in the mid-1960’s. It was during the time “Lost in Space” was on television. The first episode of that I watch was a rerun, and I remember already seeing the same episode in B&W. Much better!
Then later that year, I watched “The Wizard of Oz” and learned that when Dorothy went to Oz the film turned to color. I’d never known that before.
As ftg and others have pointed out, there was considerable standardization, just not as much as you might have expected. Even the tube numbers were uniform – the first one or two digits gave the voltage, and any manufacturer’s product could be replaced with another’s of the same number.
What looked like a lot of sockets to you on a tube tester was probably much less than if the manufacturers hadn’t agreed on some basic designs. At one time, this was the wild and woolly west of technology.
The reason for tube testers was that tubes, by their very design, gradually deteriorated through normal use. After a while, they were too weak to work adequately, but they didn’t all decline at the same rate. I used to go to homes that had TV consoles and test every tube in it. I only replaced the ones that were weakest since the bill might have been pretty inflated if we didn’t do a tube triage.
No specific memory of my first color TV, but I do remember the very first time I saw one.
It was in the radio/TV department of a downtown department store (located on the mezzanine, remember those?). Of course it had the screen that color TVs had for several years…flat on the top and bottom and rounded on the sides.
They were showing a football game, and I remember an overabundance of pinks and greens and not much else that looked very natural…and a lot of snow. Still, it was remarkable for someone who had only ever known black and white.
I’ll bet you don’t have the kind Bredin is talking about. I remember that they had them at the entrance to the Two Guys store near us*. It was a massive console kind of thing, with places to plug in three dozen or more different kinds of tube bases. If you have one of THOSE in your house, you must be a real old-time electronic enthusiast.
Here are some pictures 9although the two guys one didn’t look like this):
*Technically Two Guys from Harrison, a huge department store chain in NY, NJ, and some other states. Ours not only had all the departments of the usual department store, it had a full Supermarket, a Liquor store, and an Auto center as well
I remember tube testers in drug stores. In the time that I remember them, they were rarely if ever used relics just taking up space. I also remember seeing an old sticker book in the junk drawer at my house when I was a kid. You’d put a numbered sticker on the base and the same number on the corresponding tube, put all of the tubes in a box, take them to Sav-On and figure out which tube was bad. They must have sold replacement tubes right at the store.
Nah, just a “portable” model. Sort of shoebox scale. Bought at a garage sale a ways back. The only other vintage test equipment I have is a signal generator. I had a Heathkit VTVM but I recently got rid of that. And a not-quite vintage transistor tester that I almost never used so it got chucked.
One reason store versions were bigger is that the tubes for sale were kept behind a door or drawers underneath. I also think they had a lot of extra sockets so that the customer had fewer switches to set. The table would say what socket to put it in and maybe a switch or 2 to set.
That was my favorite store as a kid after a few Toy Stores. We had one near us in Middletown, NJ and it was great.
My parents got their first color TV in the mid-70s, after I’d moved out and off to college.
So everything I saw growing up was in b&w. I was shocked the first time I saw one of my favorite movies, Moby Dick, on a color TV, and realized that it had been filmed in color. I could’ve sworn it was shot in glorious b&w.