anyone get a colored filter (plastic sheet with blue at the top, green on the bottom and orange in the middle) to make your B&W tv have color?
I remember seeing those advertised.
We had a couple of old TVs growing up. One was a portable. It weighed about 70 lbs.* but it had handles on the side. The picture tube went out on the first one we had, but we kept it. Later we had a smaller portable that the sound went out on. We put the two TVs in the basement, one for the picture, one for the sound.
*probably less, it seemed that way when I was kid.
We got incredible reception where my family lived:
For VHF, we got three channels crystal clear and five more not crystal clear, but still pretty good. The other four I don’t think we ever got even a fuzzy picture, but once in a long while, when conditions were right, some somewhat garbled, but intelligble, sound would come thru.
We got two UHF channels crystal clear, and five more were decent.
Is your second point the reason for the first? Because current flat screens have much, much, much better viewing angles than they used to. Like…140-160 degree viewing angles.
This must be nostalgia talking (though obviously not very old nostalgia, if you were using an original X-Box.) I don’t know if you still have that old TV, or that X-Box, but I can guarantee you that if you hook that X-Box up to a modern LCD with the best connection the X-Box can handle (which IIRC is component video,) it will look much better than a TV from the 70’s hooked up with an RF connector or composite video.
The only thing I can think of that would actually make the image on the LCD TV “worse” is if it’s significantly bigger than the old tube TV. That’s one of the main reasons I hear for people with “classic” game consoles (not that I consider the X-Box classic, I’m talking about things like Atari, NES, SNES, etc…) keeping older TVs. A NES/SNES scaled up to 65" just will not look good. Also, old light gun games (like Duck Hunt) are hard/impossible to get to work with LCD TVs…though I think DLP and maybe plasma will work.
Nowhere near as old, but the first TV I had was a 19" Portland color TV, originally my parent’s TV which they gave to me around 1995 (actually, my brother and I, who shared a room); I got the TV to myself when we moved in 1999 and had it until 2005, by the time which it was 25 years old and still worked. I have also picked up plenty of older TVs off the curb over the years, including those console monsters (none so old though that they had round screens/CRTs, but some with a separate glass over the front). The gutted case of one of those console TVs can also be used as a decorative storage area (inside and top; some had wheels so you can also move them that way).
Loved it. I enjoyed The Man on the Street, and it was the first time I remember seeing Don Knotts. Didn’t Steve Allen sit on a stool sometimes and read popular song lyrics as if they were serious poetry? I was pretty young when it was on but I think I remember that.
Might be it NitroPress, thanks. I think if you pressed it you still had the channel but it would be fuzzy… And I think, I think, it had a symbol of two circles sort of attached at the side?
In my house, my brother and I were the remote controls. My dad would be in his chair and if he wanted the channel changed, one of us had to do it. In fairness, we were on the floor in front of the TV already.
And when turning it off, the light from the whole screen zoomed down to a tiny point in the middle of the screen.
And who remembers the stations playing the Star Spangled Banner at night, after the Late Show, and then going to a test pattern?
You’ll go blind sitting that close.
did anyone have your parents tell you to stand next to the tv when they would show a screen “we are having technical difficulties. please stand by.”?
or have your parents have you stand close by or touching the rabbit ears antenna because of the beneficial effect it had on the antenna performance?
Oh heck yeah. I’d always rush over to turn it down real quick because if mom and dad heard that it was time for bed. I’d look for another station to still be on but often as not there was none. We got three main channels and sometimes one fuzzy UHF. And nobody would keep broadcasting all the way throughout the night.
Didn’t you guys have trucks driving around with equipment to detect scofflaws who were watching without paying for the privilege?
Born in '64. We had a huge B&W job, that as early as I can remember was on damn near all the time. Mom got so annoyed with my older brother and sister always fighting about what to watch (amazing, back then with only three networks plus a few indies) that one Christmas she gave us three of us our own B&W 12-inch portable! (Now that I think of this, this could have been our estranged dad who did this…)
CBS was Channel 2, NBC was 4, and ABC was 7. 5, 9, 11 and 13 were indie stations in those days. We had to good UHF stations: 28, which showed PBS and Masterpiece Theatre (snore) and 52, which showed Speed Racer, Kimba, the Addams Family, the Three Stooges and, in the late seventies, Doctor Who.
We didn’t get a color TV until I was eight.
You kids today. When I was your age, we had ABC, CBS, NBC. If you were lucky, PBS. And maybe one or two UHF stations with really bad reception. In the snow . . . uphill . . . both ways . . .
in areas too small for three stations with three networks there might rarely be a station affiliated with more than one network.
Born in '64. As long as I can remember we had color TV–my dad’s family was the first in our small town to have TV back sometime in the late 40s/early 50s, so obviously it was important in our house. Unless I’m misremembering we always had a 26" console in the living room, and my parents had a smaller one (I think it was about 13") in their bedroom which I used to watch when I wanted to see something other than what they were watching. I never remember not having cable, too, so we never had to deal with moving antennas around.
When the parents got a new TV (another 26" console, sometime in the late 70s/early 80s) they gave me their old one, which ended up in my room. When it died, my dad took the guts out of it and I used it as a cabinet, with my new 17" (it was a Sharp, and the first one we owned that had a remote control) on top of it. That one had a series of buttons along the side and you had to slip little plastic pieces with channel numbers in to indicate which button went with which channel.
We lived sort of near LA so we had a lot of channels to choose from (“lot” being relative, of course) but in addition to the big 3 networks we had several stations out of LA and Santa Barbara, for a total of maybe…I dunno…13-15 channels?
I kind of miss the old days when I could go to school and be reasonably sure that most of the people there, if they’d watched TV the previous night, had watched the same thing I had. Same with radio–everybody pretty much listened to either the same top 40 station or the “cooler” one out of LA.
Yeah, but there are a lot of things that make you go blind, and watching TV is just another of those enjoyable activities.
Can I just do it until I need glasses?
I remember those stupid UHF tuners-they were always drifting off channel. UHF stations showed a lot of cheesey movies (horror, jungle/Tarzan, SciFi, etc.). You would be watching somebody being attacked by a monster from Mars…then…a screen full of snow!
Those old TVs were apparently deadly. 
A repairman told my mom that the reason my hamster died is because its cage was in the same room with the color TV. He explained that they didn’t have resistance to UV radiation emitted by the TV like people do.