I remember when we first got our Atari2600 in 77’. Back before vcrs were widespread. Since tvs really had no type of input besides an antenna they had little switchboxes that hooked up to the antenna terminals then the antenna got attached to the switchbox.
TV Guide…we planned our week accordingly too. 
I grew up with the colour tv my papa bought specially for the '74 World Cup. It was in use well into the noughties, though relegated to a guest bedroom. The set was deeper than it was wide. Somewhere in the nineties my Granny bought us a new set because she decided it was bad for our eyes.
The tv had 12 buttons for channels, but I remember when there were only four channels! There was a dial for volume and a dial for colour saturation (I swear that was just because they were so excited about colour, all it did was make everything red or black and white).
Changing channels was such a satisfying big “click”. And there was the loud crackling of the static on the screen, it made the air on your arms stand on end.
There was another button next to the on/off button that looked just like it, and I can’t remember what that did at all…
When I was a teenager, I got a combined am/fm radio and b&w tv as an Xmas gift. The tv screen was probably about 5 inches. I had it for years. With the loop antenna and the proper atmospheric conditions, I even picked up a UHF station once in a while. My last memory of it is watching the first episode of Moonlighting with a girlfriend who borrowed it for use in her first apartment in Pittsburgh. I guess when we broke up she must have kept it.
The whole thing was about the size of a 20mm ammo can and was about the same shade of olive drab. You could stuff about 10 D batteries in it and run it off them. Worked ok with the radio but it didn’t take too much tv watching to run them down. I kind of miss that tv, or more likely I just miss being that young.
Probably AFC (Automatic Frequency Control) on/off. Normally, you want your channel selection automatically fine-tuned. However, if you were in an area with sketchy reception, ghost signals and other problems could make AFC go crazy, so you switched it off. Common on TVs before PLL tuning.
As a teen, I had a 12-inch portable B&W with decorative denim accents on the side. Try finding a denim-wearing TV today!
We had one of those, much better than having my father telling one of us to stand there with one finger on the antenna and not move. All you had to do was breathe and the picture would get all wonky.
Our first color set was one my father built from a Heath Kit. He’d have to call us kids in to read the color bands on the transistors because his older eyes couldn’t see the difference between the darker colors.
Remember the TV tube testers, it was right there first thing when we walked into the drugstore. It had that weird smell.
Wow just made me flash back to the old Coppertone ads where the dog is tugging the little girl’s bathing suit down, and plunging my hand into ice cold water to pull a bottle of pop out of the old chest style pop machines.
I grew up with the type of TV described in the OP. In fact, the very first TV that I bought on my own was a Webcor 13" color set that I thought was the shizzle. Fuckin’ thing weighed as much as a Volkswagen. Did anybody else bang on the damn things when the picture wasn’t right? 
It was even more time consuming to set those things up if you planned on attaching video components. A switchbox for a video game system hooked up to the twin-lead antenna input, a twin-lead/coax balun on the switchbox, a coax to that from the splitter attached after the VCR (split so it could be hooked up to a stereo for Hi-Fi sound!), antenna or cable coax into the VCR, then figuring out how to jiggle everything so that stray RF signals wouldn’t degrade everything. I taught myself how to connect stuff by reading the Atari 2600 owner’s manual when I was a kid, then got pressed into service to set up everyone’s TVs every time they bought something new to.
I’ve got a big HDTV now, and despite having far more components all interconnected (Blu-Ray player, laserdisc player, CED player, a retro video game system or three, audio receiver, antenna), setting up everything is far more easy, despite nearly everything using a different type of connector (HDMI for Blu-Ray, component for LD, composite for CED and game systems, coax for antenna)… just have to remember which input to select on the remote for each part.
I also am boggled at how cheap TVs are now… my first TV was a 13" color portable, which cost over $300 (~$600 in today’s dollars) in the 1980s. When I got married in 1996, we invested in a 19" TV/VHS combo at around $500 (~$700), and when it died in 1999, I bought a generic 19" for around $200 (~$300). We lusted after a standard-definition widescreen rear-projection set at the laserdisc shop that cost over $5,000, and dreamt of the $20,000 50" HD MUSE widescreen plasma display from Pioneer. Now, a low-end LCD TV that outperforms all of them and has a 40" screen can be had for under $200 now; my current TV, a mid-range 55" 3D HDTV from LG, costs around $800. I’m pretty happy.
Are there any Brits in this thread yet?
England in 1966-ish had exactly 2 full channels*: BBC ONE, and the new, commercial channel (called ITV ?)
Switching between them mean turning a large knob one click in either direction. There were 12 other numbers on the dial, but they were totally irrelevant.
What really irritated me, even as a kid, was the language people used to refer to changing channels. They said “side”.
Nobody ever said “channel”, like in America. (possibly because they didnt really know what channels were–they were so used to just having the original BBC 1, some people hardly every watched the other one.)
So instead of saying “change the channel” they said “put on the other side”. Seemed really weird to me then, and still does.
*(oh, yeah-- there was another little upstart called BBC TWO that ran for a few hours each day. But it didn’t count…real boring stuff.Besides, you needed a second, UHF, antenna to receive it.)
Apparently this is still true for some. They find what they like and then never waver. I listen to a lot of British radio podcasts, and there’s a lot of referring to very distinctive audiences that only listen or watch particular channels. Radio 1, Radio 2, BBC 3, each seem to have very narrow and particular audiences. An actual Brit should be able to clarify the delineation.
Well being born in 1983 I don’t have much old TV nostalgia BUT…
Man those older TVs were tanks, I had a TV a decade older than I AM hooked up to my modded xbox which I used as a media player, man that thing had a clearer crisper picture than any newer TV. Using flatscreen LCDs now they are no where near as clear a picture.
Remember the old style cable boxes?
The channel changer was the size of a bread box. It had a single row of about twenty puch buttons and on the side was a three prong switch (A,b,c.). And the idea of remote back then was a 20’ or so wire that phyically connected from the changer to the TV set.
I’m not quite old enough to remember our family’s B&W TV, although I do have a vague memory of playing in the living room and yelling to someone that smoke was pouring out of it (it wasn’t even turned on!) My dad & older brothers unplugged it, carried it out onto the front porch and poured water on it via a drinking glass ‘bucket-brigade’ from the kitchen faucet!
Then got a 25" Sylvania ‘woody’ which I grew up watching. The volume knob became messed up and for whatever reason our TV repairman(!) couldn’t (or wouldn’t) fix it (the variable resistor just needed to be replaced). Consequently you had to wiggle the on/off/volume knob to get the sound to work. It would often go out and rather than get up someone would pound their foot on the floor a few times to get it to come back on (amazing how completely used to this we all got).
It didn’t have a remote (you had to be rich to have one of those), it had only a twin lead hookup originally with an antenna on the roof. I lived halfway between Albany & NYC so we got the national network feeds (CBS-2, NBC-4 & ABC-7). Channel 5 was originally WNEW (became WNYW when it became a Fox affiliate in the late 80s), channel 9 was WWOR, channel 11 WPIX and 13 PBS (3, 6, 8, 10 & 12 were originally nothing). I don’t think we got any UHF, we never really knew what the hell that other dial was for! I remember being amazed the first time I went someplace far away and found out that some people had network ‘affiliates’ on crazy non-2, 4 or 7 channels! And channel 13 NOT being PBS! Of the independent stations 5 & 11 were cool, but there was always something ‘weird’ about channel 9, it just seemed very low-budget and a little sleazy.
When we got cable in '75 we had to use a coax/twin lead adapter. There was no cable boxes yet, cable just got you a solid picture and a couple extra independent channels (the previously unused 3, 8 & 12). For the first year or so the cable would go out nearly every time it thunder-stormed. We soon also got HBO (can’t tell you the reaction for a ten or so year old boy to hear swear words and, most importantly, see bare titties right on TV!!). Again, no cable box, just one of those silver, cylindrical coax filters which descrambled HBO on channel 6. Actually, it didn’t quite ‘descramble’ it because it wasn’t digitally encrypted. At first it just had this pulsating interference signal that the round filters, ah, filtered. They became a hot black market item sold by cable guys. Sometimes newer TVs would actually be able to get HBO free by turning the outer ‘fine-tuning’ dial (remember those?!) It was always in B&W and didn’t have sound, but because it was on channel 6 you could hook up your FM stereo to the TV cable and turn the dial all the way to one end and get the sound (FM was between what used to be TV broadcast channels 6 & 7!) Then they eventually switched to the ‘no horizontal sync pulse’ scrambling (sound usually worked, but no picture). Cable boxes didn’t come about until the mid 80s, first the mechanical pushbutton ones, then the all electronic ‘digital display’ ones. At the same time TVs starting coming with remotes and were ‘cable-ready’ (i.e. they could tune the non-premium early cable channels like MTV).
Last CRT TV a bought was a 25" Sony Wega. It was a tube, but a flat tube! As soon as I saw them (Sony came out with flat tubes first) I had to have one. Paid $600 for it in 1999 (from Circuit City). Still works. Gave it to my sister in 2008 after I got my first HDTV and, even though I still had the original box, I was only just barely able to get that thing into the box by myself, it must’ve weighted at least 80 lbs! Had to use a hand truck on the box.
I remember our first color set which we got rather late (1979). It was a hybrid of solid state and tubes (Zenith I think, 19" screen). It got hot enough to warm a small room, and so, my cat took to sleeping in top of it. I eventually moved out and took the set with me. When I replaced it with a bigger (20") screen solid-state model, I gave the old one to a friend who was an electronics tinkerer. He called me and asked what the hell I did with the set as it was filled with hair. Meow.
Back in the early ‘80s we had a tv that had the buttons for channels along the bottom. When the kids were watching tv with us, it was their job to change the channels, but after they went to bed, who ever was sitting in the chair closest to the tv would use a 6’ tall wood hiking stick to push the buttons. 
When that tv died (it had a lingering death. First, it started letting out a high pitched whine - which we could stop by stomping a foot on the floor. Then, on hot days, the screen would go black. Then, the picture in the upper right side of the screen would start to bow in and take on a greenish tint - slowly bowing further & further in - we would turn the tv off, wait a minute, and turn it back on, until, one day it bowed in all green & really fast and went crackle/clink. The end.) my husband brought home a new tv. We turned it on, picked a channel, and sat down to watch, and the channel switched to a different channel than back to the first channel with out us touching the tv. Whaaaat?! Is it broken?! It did it again & again and my husband started laughing - he had bought a tv with a remote.
I also left out that the big, furniture encased 25 inch models were the biggest you could get for a long time. And those were only for (reasonably well-off) family living rooms. The standard bachelor’s or couple’s TV was the 19 inch and they always cost about $350 (in late 70s/early 80s money). Once the Japanese started making them in the 80s though the prices began to plummet. (Not sure why but there was a reason why TVs always came in odd numbered inches).
“Oh dear, the knob came off the UHF changer - someone get the pliers”
I always enjoyed how you had to set the VHF to 0 to use the UHF channels.
Ghosts. V-Hold. etc.
There are a few movies I rewatched recently where my first & only experience in seeing them was on a tiny 12" B&W TV. From that to a large HD screen is quite the change.
I remember when we got our first color TV, sometime in the 60s. We came home for lunch, and for once our mom let us turn on the TV. I never knew Bozo’s hair was ORANGE!
I used to golf with this guy. Often think he had more effect on more peoples’ daily lives than anyone else I’ve personally known. Anyone else remember when someone jingling their keys would make the channel switch?
Graceland is one of my favorite places I’ve gone. Doesn’t take much else to illustrate how much we’ve changed when the biggest celebrity in the world had a tricked out media room with THREE 19" TVs, so he could watch ALL THREE channels! 
The first TV I can remember was probably my parent’s first major purchase after college. It was a B&W, probably about 25" or so but it was built into a long and enormously heavy wooden console. The screen was center left and to its right there was a radio and a stackable LP player that slid out on a drawer. On either end were the speakers, both hidden behind a gold screen that had interwoven brass rods as a protective lattice. The thing was probably 7 feet long and weighed a metric ton. There were two wooden screens that could be slid across the front to hide everything, much like the screen on a rolltop desk.
And yes, when you turned the TV off the little dot of light in the middle persisted a fascinating amount of time to a six year old.