Whoa! Unless my brain has thoroughly mushed, U-matic was Sony’s trade name for the 3/4" cassette format, the de facto standard for TV news for 15 or 20 years.
In the early 70s my high school had a video recorder that used 1/2" reel tape (helical scan). Black and white, not color.
I also vaguely recall an 8mm film format that had an endless loop of film in a plastic housing.
It used to big a pretty big deal when popular movies were re-broadcast on TV. I remember when “Top Gun” was shown on TV I had a whole bunch of friends over… it was an event. (note: I was 12). That is probably one of the last movies I remember being a “big deal” on TV as soon after normal people starting having VHS (as opposed to only rich kids with nerdy dads).
Also, they always showed movies on Saturday afternoon – usually adventures or romantic comedies – “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Big Trouble in Little China” are two movies that in my mind are ‘classic saturday afternoon flicks’.
Jerked off to magazines? 
Okay, you win the thread.
In US-Canada border cities, episodes of American shows would often appear on Canadian television before they aired on US network affiliates. One could watch an episide of … oh, MASH on CTV at 8:00 PM on Tuesday, and then on CBS at 9:00 PM on Wednesday. (I’m just throwing times out of my ass, but you get the idea.)
I played around out in the yard, climbed trees, played pool, went to summer weekday movies at a local theatre, watched TV. A lot of Price is Right, Gilligan’s Island, Get Smart, Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry, Buck Rogers. Of course if a show was on and you missed it, it was gone buddy! VCRs were ok, but to truly get free of the TV schedule took a Tivo.
I certainly remember TV showings of films being big events. In my 20s, I was in a band who were playing on the night that Star Wars was first broadcast on TV, and one of the members had brought in a black-and-white portable set so we could watch it in-between being on stage. (For the record, I barely saw any of it, because I simply wasn’t interested.)
And, as Uncommon Sense points out, in the early days, domestic VHS recorders were so expensive and failure-prone that pretty much everyone rented them - I don’t recall them being available for short-term rental here, but I had a kind of leasing arrangement (£15 per month in about 1982), and that was the norm.
And yes, they had corded remote controls. The one I rented had a single three-position switch for stop, play and pause - anything else meant getting on your hands and knees on the floor, although the basic functions - fast and slow forward and rewind, single-frame step-through, record programming and so on - were available via the front panel.
And remember - when domestic VHS recorders first came out, TV stands didn’t have shelves below them (there was no prior need), so most people had the devices sitting on the carpet to one side of the TV, or even behind it in some cases.
As for the OP, what did we do? We listened to music, read books, went to pubs, talked to people through dial-operated telephones, and yes … sometimes watched TV, if there was anthing good on at the time.
I remember people renting VCRs around 1980 or so, but we and most other people I knew bought ours (a GE top-loading model that lasted for probably 15 years. It even had a wired remote control.)
However when it came to renting movies, the first local rental store charged you a membership fee of something like $80, I don’t recall how much the rental fees were though.
When I was a wee lad, about once every couple of months the elementry school would show feature films for most of a saturday, giving the parents a break. IIRC, a quarter to attend, which paid for the film rentals. We’d sit on the gym floor, several hundred of us, and you could buy popcorn for a dime (or was it a nickle?). You were allowed (expected?) to bring a sack lunch and your own soda. It was usually two feature films, and several cartoons.
Fraternal organizations would conduct similar “movie nights” as fund raisers, admission far cheaper than theater tickets to see ancient, but beloved films…often preceeded by a spaghetti dinner or some such.
The re-release comment is on the money too. Disney in particular, used to re-release all the classic animated films every 2-3 years…they were targeted at an audience that was too young for the previous release, and there was nothing in “Snow White” or “101 Dalmations” to date them.
In my home town near St. Louis in the early 70s the theatres showed Saturday matinee movies for the kids. They were usually very old (by kid standards any) or B-movie; a few titles I remember were Billy Jack, The Fantastic Voyage, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Lost Horizon.
There were usually reruns showing on TV as soon as we came home from school. We used to watch imports from Japan like Speed Racer, Astro-Boy, Johnny Sokko’s Flying Robot & Ultraman on the UHF channel, and Batman, The Munsters, The Addams Family, Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family on the big network affiliates.
Cable TV didn’t catch on in the St. Louis area until later and I first encountered it around 1977 when my family moved to Utah. Alas, we were poor and douldn’t afford cable, so there was lots of fiddling with the rabbit ears.
Wher remakes of old movies were released they would show the original on TV. That was how I first saw the original King Kong.
Overall I think young adults had what were called hobbies, people interested in Stereo (you could spend a lot of money on that), and other electronics. After Star Wars there were action figures and movie-based toys for us kids.
There were school and church dances and in utah our church always had youth activities for the middle school and high school kids. There was boy scouts which took up a lot of time and did al the outdoorsy stuff.
What I really want to know is this: How did people waste time at the office before the internet?
HBO first broke onto the scene a few years before VCR’s became widely available. That seemed like a big deal at the time because you could see R-rated movies on television. Boobies on TV was as momentous as the discovery of fire to me when I was 12 years old.
Incidentally, we didn’t used to have remote controls. We had to actually get up and flip the dial on the TV set. That made channel surfing too much of a pain in the ass and was part of the reason that Networks used to be able to engineer ratings for entire nights rather than for 15 minutes at a time.
When I was a kid, movie theaters had bargain kid’s matinees every Saturday, year 'round.
I also belonged to thew local YMCA, which had a Saturday program that included a movie. Usually pretty bottom-of-the-barrel stuff like Giany from the Unknown, but sometimes cool stuff like seventh Voyage of Sinbad (which I love – see above) or Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.
well, before we had the internet hooked up there was Minesweeper and Solitaire, and before that Life and a gazillion versions of “Star Trek” and Adventure/Cave Adventure.
And before that, you actually had to talk to your co-workers.
Long bathroom breaks.
Longer-than-normal “field visits”.
Recreational reading.
Playing computer games. (Many games in the 1980s and 1990s had “boss modes” with pop-up spreadsheets."
Much more “water cooler” talk.
Pretty much every Saturday we went to the movies. And, in my earliest days, at the big theatre, “going to the movies” consisted of:
Cartoon
Main feature
Serial
Newsreel (this was almost entirely gone by the time I was a kid)
2nd feature
sing-a-long with organ
Bingo or ticket lotto
Main feature again
This whole shebang ran twice a day on Saturdays (once a night the rest of the week). You just went, you didn’t check the time. If you walked in during a film, you just sat through everything and watched the first half. You brought a large sack of food, but still usually bought some as you were there for 5+ hours.
The local “grindhouse” did a “kiddie matinee” Saturdays daytime, with two or three films like Jerry Lewis, Shaggy Professor, Flubber, + cartoons.
Most TV shows were rerun and in order. We still watched a lot of TV.
My dad did slide shows. :eek: :smack: Some other dads did 8mm home movies. Card nite was popular, my partents “group” had this twice a month. You went to your club- usually the VFW or something- once a week or more. Scouting was huge. PTA. Even the religiously ambivilent often sent the kids to Sunday school.
The only video game available in the (late) 70’s was Pong. That also seemed like the cat’s pajama’s at the time.
Seriously, before the current kinds of media entertainment we now have available, people used to just make do with whatever they could find on the tube or they would find lower tech ways to entertain themselves. Reading used to be kind of popular. Also board games. Also just going outside – going for walks, chilling on the porch. Stuff like that. It sounds like that would suck, but we didn’t know it sucked at the time. If we’d have known what was coming, we’d have gone crazy waiting, I’m sure.
Before home video machines existed, some devoted TV-watchers used movie cameras to record television shows by aiming the camera at the TV screen. This is called “kinescoping.” The image tends to be fuzzy and low-contrast, but there are many old shows that would be totally lost to us if it weren’t for the amateur kinescopes. My dad used to do this. Unfortunately, his films became useless because of improper storage.
Not true – as I say above, there were various versions of “Star Trek” and Life around in the late 1970s, along with the text-only adventure Adventure/Cave Adventure.
TV stations used to broadcast a lot more movies then they do now. I remember one of the NYC stations (WPIX?) used to show a movie every weekday afternoon at 4:00 pm for the kids getting home from school. The networks used to broadcast major movies in primetime a year or so after their theatrical release. And the majority of late night television was old movies.
Are these console games or PC games. I remember text only games coming out for PC’s in the early 80’s, but Atari was already out by then.
Around 1977-79 (which is when I had Pong), I don’t think I’d ever even heard of a personal computer. They certainly weren’t ubiquitous.