Absolutely. Just chiming in, I grew up with a wired remote.
My uncle built the color TV from a Heathkit project.
Brace yourself - occasionally the TV would go on the fritz, and my dad would pull out all the tubes and we would take them in a shoebox to the tester in the lobby of the local supermarket to figure out which one was flaky. Then we bought a new one there.
We usually walked about ten miles each way uphill in the snow when we did this… and we liked it!
We could also buy new ‘needles’ for our ‘phonographs’ at record stores. They had a big spinning display of them, like Timex watch displays.
Speaking of wired VCR remotes. My first VCR, a Panasonic PV-1220 had a wired remote. You had to press play on the machine and the remote had forward & reverse scanning and pause. That was in 1984.
My first VCR, a betamax, also had a wired remote. And it had a bunch of little knobs under the top cover, to tune in the channels that you wanted it to receive. I never saw a TV with a wired remote.
My older sister, after she got married off, had a TV with one of those sonic remotes that clicked to make the channel change. I’ve heard that jangling car keys would also make the TV change channels.
When I was younger, even this wouldn’t have done us any good, because our little TV only got one channel. I have this memory from when I was six or seven, my dad brought home a new TV, a black and white job with a label on the front that said “Zenith” and under that, “All Channel.” This was exciting, because I thought it would get more than Channel 7. I was very disappointed.
When my I got married in 1980, my husband and I had a Sony TV with a wired remote. It took forever to cycle around the dial (ka-chunka chunka chunka). There was a separate wired remote for the cable controller (which had 36 channels, selected by big oval pushbuttons), and yet another wired remote for our VCR, a JVC VidStar.
Not directly to the point of the OP, but my grandmother’s 1960s TV had a wireless remote with two buttons: Volume/On/Off, which would turn on the set, cycle through three increasing volume settings, then off. And Channel, which ran up through the eight or ten preset channels.
We discovered how it worked one day when I dropped a quarter into a marble ashtray and the volume changed. The remote buttons compressed little bellows that blew air through high-frequency whistles of two different pitches. It was an entirely mechanical, no-batteries-needed remote. You couldn’t hear the whistles, but the quarter hitting the ashtray coincidentally created a harmonic that was just the right frequency. It was pretty cool.
Even when my dad got a “wired” remote he used to make us kids get up and change the channel for him. :smack: Dad couldn’t deal with the new technology. :eek:
When I lived in the states in the late 80’s we had a wired remote. However, because I was only young at the time I can’t remember if it was connected directly to the TV, or maybe to a converter, or the cable box.
I have a fond memory of that VCR. My dad went out and bought one (at, what I believe was an enormous price) so that we could watch ABC’s The Day After. News articles about that movie described it as being so intense you shouldn’t watch it alone. My mom didn’t want to watch it and I think we had to be out that night anyway, so Dad got us the VCR so that he and I could watch it later. I must have been in ninth grade around then.
When I was growing up, my parents had a remote control TV. Actually, it had two remotes that went by the names of “David” and “Patty”. If Mom or Dad wanted the channel changed or the volume adjusted, all they had to do was say “David change the channel.” or “Patty, turn up the volume.” The requested action took place usually within a few seconds of the request. I guess you could call that a sonic remote.
I remember going to the appiance store to get a new TV with my parents. We were looking at two identical sets, the only difference being that one had an IR remote and the other did not. My dad said, “We don’t really need a remote, do we?” and my sister and I emphatically told him that we did indeed need a remote.
Then, the cable company brought out the Scientific Atlanta converter that throttleZ mentions. The slider sat firmly next to my dad’s chair. It was quite the power struggle between me and my sister to sit in that spot when he wasn’t there.
We had a Betamax and a cable converter with wired controllers. It was fun when they got tangled together.
Although we did not have one, I remember seeing a TV with a wired controller sometime in the mid '70s, but I think the TV was a good bit older than that, probably from the 60s. It was a color TV, so I’m pretty sure it dated to the late 60s or so.
I had a VCR with a wired remote. You plugged it into a jack that looked like a modern headphone jack. We didn’t have a remote for the TV. It was a 24" late-70s or early-80s POS with 13 main channels and a UHF dial. Took for frigging ever to change channels on the UHF dial.
Since the OP has been addressed, I’d like to add something that’s related but not exactly on topic. Does anybody else remember the old wireless remotes? A friend’s father had an early set with a remote that worked on radio frequencies. Every once in a while the TV would do something wonky because a signal from outside penetrated the walls and triggered the receiver. Too bad that technology is dead and gone, because I can imagine a scene in a sitcom where two guys living next door to each other buy a TV made by the same manufacturer with remotes that work on some of the same frequencies and a laff riot ensues.
