Two different kinds of dials: One on the tv actually changed the channel, like the dials on old microwaves set the . . . setting.
The dial I mentioned earlier was for people who had motor-driven antennas, and they used a dial (ours was about as big as a saucer), to tell the motor which way to turn the antenna. Your package also came with sticky numers for your dial so that you could easily tell where to set your antenna for best reception. This was a separate unite about as big as a mouse pad, and usually sat atop the console TV, which was what most people had back then.
There would be a discrete knob on the set for selecting the basic channel (2, 3, and up through 13 for VHF) — and then there would be a “fine-tuning” dial around the knob for honing in on the reception band still further. This dial was sometimes necessary because it was possible for the TV’s reception band to drift a little from the true broadcast band.
For UHF channels, some TVs duplicated the same knob and dial setup as for VHF. (Like the TV pictured above seems to.) Others I remember just had a single free rotating dial for UHF.
My daughter is 28, and she has never known life without cable (unless we had a storm and the cable went out.) we live in a rural area where an antenna wouldn’t get you any stations other than one local one you could get with rabbit ears, so she wouldn’t know what to do with an antenna dial or fine tuning dial. She has also always had a remote, so she doesn’t know the fun of getting off the couch to see what else is on.
They were not common items in people’s homes — just in case someone here is thinking that. I suppose you might have one if you were heavily into electronics, or were a ham radio operator.
Tube testers were often seen in places like Sears or general hardware stores, where you could bring in your vacuum tubes from home for testing, and buy replacements if they proved to be dead.
I recently encountered seventeen year olds that did not understand the significance of the Berlin Wall coming down and thought references to the Red Army in WWII was somehow related to the social conservative Republician political causes.
For what it’s worth, I’m 40, and have never not had cable, and have no idea how antennas/UHF/those dial-y things on old TVs work.
A lot of people’s experience with TVs & cable is due to where they grew up. I grew up in a small town, far away from any major metropolitan area. There were (and are) no channels that come in without cable in my town. As far back as I can remember, if you had a TV, you had cable, because it was useless without it.
Interestingly, because everyone up here had cable, they also had Cable-based broadband Internet WAY before a lot of the rest of the country had it. I remember having to contract with a strange third-party company to get DSL in Boulder CO in the late 90s; it wasn’t available at all from the phone company or cable, even though Boulder was a major hi-tech area. It was a hassle to find a company that could provide service in my house, and it was expensive.
Meanwhile, my mother, living in the middle of nowhere in da UP, had broadband cable Internet for something like $20/month. It was seriously weird.
The knob that’s actually attached to the TV (the dial) was numbered 2 through 14 and had a UHF setting. If you wanted channel 4, you turned the dial to 4. If the picture was bad or had static, there was a ring around the dial that you could rotate for fine tuning. If you wanted a UHF station (15 through 78?) you turned the dial to “U” and then a second dial underneath was tuned to the UHF channel you wanted.
When you changed channels, you’d sometimes have to adjust the antennas (the ones that stuck out of the top of the TV), but if you were in a place that didn’t get good reception, you’d have an outdoor antenna. With the outdoor antenna, it might not be aimed in the proper direction to pick up certain channels. So someone would have to go outside and rotate it until the picture cleared up, usually requiring two people or a window view of the TV.
You could also attach a motor to the outdoor antenna and then you’d have a box that sat on top of the TV with a knob that worked the motor and made the antenna turn.
These were still common in the 80s and early 90s, but most of 'em were hooked up to cable and the dial was permanently set to channel 2 or 3 and all of the tuning was done through the cable box, so I can see how someone under 30 might have never had to touch the dial on the TV and maybe even not know how it worked.
I think a lot of it has to do with simply paying attention. Even if someone was born after the time when tvs with dials were made, chances are they have seen them on multiple occasions. I recently bought a box of laser discs at a garage sale and my friend who is my age claimed he’d never seen them. While they certainly never had the success they’d hoped for, they were for sale in stores. I remember getting them at stores that I know he’s shopped in since childhood: Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, etc. It’s not that he’s never seen them, he just didn’t pay attention to things he had definitely at least seen before.
Mid-forties here. I was talking about stress to a co-worker in her late 20’s, and I made a comment to her that I “always run at about 78 rpm”. She had no idea what I meant, so I had to explain how record players used to have speed settings of 78, 45, and 33 rpm.
If my father was describing someone who talked a lot, he would say, “She was innoculated with a phonograph needle”. My kids have NO IDEA what a phonograph needle is. Or about putting a quarter on top of the arm to keep the record from skipping.
And ours would make a nice deep wumwumwumwumwum sound as it turned ever so slowly. It actually gave a satisfying bit of feedback that something big was happening (and indeed it was—the antenna was turning on the roof)
We put the stickers on for the Detroit stations, Windsor station, and Toledo station.
Of course, that was a huge dial, a bit bigger than a CD.
The one Bytegeist mentioned (and I think the OP is talking about) was the fine-tuning outer ring around the channel dial on the TV.
I remember opening up lots of dead televisions in high school and was quite intrigued as to the mechanism for that little fine tuner:
The main channel changer knob turned a cylinder, like on a gun, that had electronic gizmos in it for each of the 12 channels (2-13)—the bullets as it were. Along with the other gizmos, there was a small coil on the end of each of the twelve “chambers”, the size of a fat pencil eraser. These little coils had a threaded insert with a gear on the end; turning the gear would tune the coil.
As you flipped the main channel selector, the cylinder rotated, bringing the next channel’s tuning coil to the top.
The outer ring would then engage the small gear on the topmost coil, providing that fine tuning.
I love looking inside older technology and wondering how they could afford to make such fancy mechanical stuff and still turn a profit.
And 16 rpm, too! When I was about 6, we bought one of those combo set-ups, with a TV in the middle, a phonograph on the left side and a radio on the right side. The phonograph had all four speeds, and the radio had both AM and FM, which was a big deal at the time. The console was made by DuMont.
Laser Disc: I usually explain that it’s a really, really big CD. (I used to say it was a CD as big as a phonograph, but I had to give that up about 10 years ago.)
Corduroy: it felt like felt but had stripes.
The Michael Jackson Jacket: not the black one from “Bad,” but the red one from Beat it or the V-top from Thriller.
Super Sentai: I don’t know why, but the only term people know is “Voltron,” but everybody knows the Voltron reference, and nobody knows the Super Sentai reference (which is the classification for all Japanese superheroes who were in groups of 5 or 3 and formed a giant robot at the end of the show.)
McDLT: for years it was the only fresh vegetable you could get from McD’s. (Yes, I know they sold salads before the McDLT. I said “fresh”.)
Busy signals: back in the day, only rich people had call waiting or answering machines.
[ul]
[li]Manual transmissions.[/li][li]Reel to reel tape desks.[/li][li]Television signoffs and the National Anthem.[/li][li]Loony Tunes.[/li][li]Johnny Quest.[/li][li]Manners.[/li][/ul]
Simple. Consumer electronics used to be very expensive, even decades after the technology used was widespread.
In 1976, armed with $210 of hard-earned cash, I bought a 12" Quasar color television at a Two Guys discount department store. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $800 in 2010 dollars.
Think about it: $800 for a portable color television. In 1976, color television wasn’t some new technology that only wealthy early adopters enjoyed. I grew up in a lower-middle class neighborhood, and I’d say about 75% of my neighbors at the time had color televisions; it was mainly seniors that still had only black-and-white sets. In the US, color television had been around since the early 1950s, and most shows were broadcast in full color by the late 1960s, excepting older reruns and movies. Even in the mid-1970s, crappy cable pubic access shows were in color. (Anyone remember when TV Guide listings indicated whether a show was aired in black-and-white or color?)
I’m 25 and grew up in a boderline working/lower middle class household and we always had cable TV. We did have a small TV in the kitchen that had a dial (it was also hooked up to an antenna instead of cable). Oh, and we used an antenna for the camper TV as Dad didn’t usually bother paying for the cable hookup (& not every campground had them).
