In What Year Did This Happen?

Factual Questions
1

I remember when I was a kid, I would turn on the TV and I had to wait for it to warm up! Also, programming was NOT on 24 hours a day. The stations went off the air around 1AM or 2AM and to conclude the show, I think it was the American Anthem that was played and I faintly remember pictures of the war being flashed and the final picture was that of the U.S. Flag being raised.

Does anyone else remember this?

My question is…In what year did we turn to 24 hour programming and leave behind the patriotic conclusion?

Thanks

2

We had all night TV here in Houston by about 1971. I may be off by a year. Cable, while initially developed in the late '40s, only swept across the country in the early 1970s. IIRC, for the most part, with it came 24 hour programming, although I think our local indie here, Channel 26, may have beat cable to it.

3

The warm-up was a function of vacuum tube TV sets, whose popularity was waning by the early 1970’s. Early solid state sets powered some circuitry in sleep mode to effect an instant-on function. Test patterns disappeared on a station by station basis-I don’t believe there was a given year in which they went by the wayside. In the Phila area, my Dad and I would wait for them to arrive-it was the best time to work on TV sets to adjust raster, pincushion phase, and convergence (Dad and I built a Heathkit color TV in the late 1960’s). Test patterns that I remember weren’t PC-they showed an indian chief at the center. :eek:

4

OK, surprise me…what’s “wrong” with that?

5

Nothing’s inherently wrong with it. I think today it might be seen as disrespectful to use an oppressed race as a symbol or mascot. The same way people oppose Indian names for sports teams.

6

In San Diego, at least, the Fox and NBC affiliates didn’t go to 24 hour programming until the late '90s or so. Fox was off the air from 2 AM - 6 AM; NBC from 3 AM - 6 AM.

7

When I was in Junior High ('round 78 or 79) I ended up staying up all night every night for the length of one summer vacation. This was before we’d gotten cable so I was limited to the three network affiliates, PBS and two or three UHF stations. I’d end up having to switch from station to station as each one would go off the air (iirc, depending on what night of the week it was one of the affiliates would stay on all night showing old movies).

As each one ended it’s broadcast day it would play it’s national anthem “music video” - scenes of waving flags, bald eagles, waterfalls, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, etc. All except one of the UHF stations. They’d end each night with the Beatles song Good Night from the White Album accompanied by a scene of the sun slowly setting. I always thought that was pretty cool. :slight_smile:

Eric

8

Where I live, it was sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s. That’s when the local stations discovered that they could run infomercials all night and make money rather than being off the air from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m.

9

Oklahoma City of the present.

We still do sign offs. The local afiliates that UPN and WB don’t always have paid programming to last through the night, so they’ll sign off. The local PBS affiliate signs off every night.

10

It will differ a lot regionally, as stations made their own decisions regarding “local programming” in the early morning hours. As noted, some stations still do “sign-offs” today. However, I would agree that sometime in the 1970’s was when you were likely to find something other than test patterns at 2:00 AM somewhere on the dial in many parts of the country.

BTW, the “Indian Head” test pattern looked like this:

http://www.mediacollege.com/video/test-patterns/television/indian-head.html

It wasn’t universal though - my earliest memories are of living in the Buffalo, NY, vicinity, and I distinctly recall a test pattern with the outline of a bison.

Cable TV did not originally have it’s own programming intended to compete with the broadcast channels. The original idea, called CATV, stood for “community antenna television”, and was simply to bring reception to rural and small town fringe areas requiring large mast mounted antennas to pick up anything. You subscribed to the service and shared the costs of maintaining a big tower and a huge antenna on top of a hill somewhere. It wasn’t for a couple decades that it became an urban phenomenon, and it started occuring to people that you could create “cable only” programming and attract a large audience.

Another “when did it happen” - when did color TV’s start reliably adjusting themselves, and staying adjusted? I remember early color tv’s that had to continually be manually tuned to avoid watching purple or green people (of course, you could also derive extra entertainment by deliberately turning the newscasters green, etc). I would hazard a guess that solid state electronics had a lot to do with being able to design circuits that didn’t “drift” like old tube designs.

And of course, even for people that didn’t really know what they were doing, “tube testers” used to be available - if the TV set was on the fritz, you could take out all the tubes, go down to the TV repair store, run them all through the self-service tube tester, and replace the bad ones. Sometimes, it even worked, given that you actually remembered where each tube went.