Mine was a black & white set & I bought a piece of rainbow colored plastic that is made to put on the front of the tv to get a simulated color tv. I thought it was so cool!
I remember seeing the ads for those way back when and wondering, “How does it know to make the grass green and the sky blue and to leave the Lone Ranger’s horse white?”
You’re the first person I’ve ever met who admits to having had one of them, so…did it just randomly color things any-old-way in gaudy colored stripes, or was there a modicum of sense to it?
Hey I remember those. Dad came home all excited about it so we went to visit a guy he knew that had one.
What a let down.
The Lone Rangers horse had green legs and a blue head and the lone ranger kept changing shirts depending on how far he was from the camera.
Actually our first color tv was a Zenith round tube bought in 1964 or 5. FWIW it cost about $300.00 new.
They’ve come a long way , baby.
Count me in a household that was the last one on the block to get anything new. Heck, we had rotary phones well into the Eighties.
I remember the color sets of the 60’s. They took about a year to warm up and you could feel the radiation penetrating your body like a CAT scan gone horribly wrong. I remember the early remote controls as well. The worked on sound waves. When you pressed a button on the remote, a hammer would strike a metal bar inside and a high frequency sound would emanate and activate something in the set.
Interesting color TV trivia - while STAR TREK did horribly in the regular Neilsen ratings, it was the NUMBER ONE show when only color shows were considered. Source: “Inside Star Trek” by Solow & Justman
A big old second-hand 20" Zenith that my dad bought in 1968. The guy up the street would come over every year or so to degausse and retune it. Kept it going for 12 years until it was replaced with a 25" RCA.
My own first color set was an RCA 13" colortrak '92. Then I picked up a used 25" NEC monitor, industrial stereo 95 pound monster circa 1989. I use my vcr as a tuner and keep a camcorder jack plugged into the front. Both are still going strong, awaiting replacement w/hdtv.
For the family – a big 25" Zenith Chromacolor, in a Colonial-style console, complete with the bald eagles and fake drawers. Got it in 1973, and we paid Burnham’s (an extinct Buffalo-area appliance dealer) $650 for the set. We also got cable at the time – 12 channels, including one showing nothing but an analog clock, barometer and thermometer. The set lasted through 15 years of heavy use.
Of my own – a 12" Quasar, purchased for $210 of my allowance and savings money at Two Guys (remember that store?) in 1976. (I was ten years old at the time.) I still have that TV to this day, and except for some needed cleaning to the variable resistors and mechanical tuning components, it still works fine.
I have always had color TV (yep, I’m a young’un). I do, however, remember the last B&W TV we had. It was in my parents room, atop their dresser, and it got so few channels, we kids never watched it. My only real memories of it are when my grandmother stayed in that room for a while before she died. We’d come home from school, run up to her room, and she’d be sitting there watching TV, then she’d give us a chocolate, and my parents would make us leave because they didn’t want us to overtire her.
ahhh. memories.
“You’re the first person I’ve ever met who admits to having had one of them, so…did it just
randomly color things any-old-way in gaudy colored stripes?”
Yep, that describes it pretty much. Sometimes you would get certain things just the right color though.
Used to watch ads for new color TV’s on it but you could only see the color in black & white. If you already had a color tv, you wouldn’t need another one.
Our first color TV was a Zenith, we got it in 1967 (I was 7 at the time, do the math). I came home from school one day and there it was, the older family members were very excited. Hard to believe that we only had 3 channels then, and they went off the air at 11:30 p.m.
Mine was another such family…I know that we had rotary phones until after my younger brother was born in 1981.
For some reason, I don’t remember having a color TV until the late 70’s or early 80’s…but that could be one of those false memory things. But I’m pretty sure that we played Atart on a B&W TV when we first got it.
KingRat
We used to get TV repair calls to repair those remote controls. First thing would be pull out your keys, we had a lot of keys back then, and shake them. If the tv did anything the remote handheld was bad.
Count me as another person who first played Atari on a B&W TV. I must admit though, my family had another (color) TV; the B&W TV was the old set. The color TV dated from about 1981.
In 1985 (when I was 12) I won a color TV set in a raffle. This remains the largest prize I’ve ever won in a game of chance.
That can’t be right. The primetime schedules of the three networks were all color by the fall of 1966. ABC was the last to go full color.
I don’t have the book in front of me, unfortunately. I may indeed be misstating it. Perhaps they said Star Trek was number 1 amongst people who owned color TV sets. I’ll check it out unless someone beats me to it.
Our first color set was a Sony Trinitron, circa mid 1970’s. I remember a high school buddy who had his own 13 inch Sony Trinitron in his room, with cable! To me that was unbelievable. We’re taking 1975 or so.
As for our first color TV…had to have happened between 8th grade and 10th grade (based on when we moved between houses), so that would’ve been 1973-4 thereabouts.
I eventually inherited the old black-and-white and would periodically open the case and file down the analog channel contacts with an emery board, and would haul the vaccuum tubes to the pharmacy’s tube tester and replace them as they wore out.
First colour TV – a Sony Trinitron, purchased in 1975 for my parents at Canex (the department store chain that serves Canadian Forces bases) for about Cdn$250. It replaced an RCA black-and-white vacuum-tube model that dated from the early sixties, and remained in service in the family until 1992, when my father died. I sold it for $100 because no-one in the family needed another TV.
13" Admiral tv w/remote. ought in 1987 at Circuit City for 139 dollars. My parents had color televisions, but this is the first one I ever owned.
Same here.
We had rotary phones until 1992, when I returned from College and plugged in the phone I had been using at school. Found I had to set it on “pulse” instead of “tone” because we didn’t have a touch-tone line. The local phone company (which to this day is still not a part of the Bell Atlantic monster) didn’t offer touch-tone service until 1990 or so, and my parents weren’t about to pay for it while their old rotary phones were still alive and kicking.
So while the parents got their first “push button” phone in 1992, they didn’t get touch-tone 'til they moved in 1995.
As for color TV, we got our first color TV in 1988.
And we bought our first microwave in 1990, as well as our first VCR.
I always felt so backwards!
Spring of 1981. I was in college, making do with a 12 inch B&W. A furniture store in town had remodeled, and was giving away a 13 inch RCA color TV and a microwave as prizes. I went down, no rules were posted, but people were putting in several entries each. I got a handful of entry forms, filled them in back at the apartment (when I should have been studying), then returned to put them in the box and get more forms. This went on for about two weeks. I think I had over 600 entries, and I won! The owner was a bit ticked, think he had to draw for awhile to find someone else to get the microwave.
Don’t know the brand, but as for my first color TV experience I will never forget coming home from school for lunch on day, probably in 65-66 or so, and there he was, Bozo the Clown in all his orange yak-hair glory. Wow!
My p’s moved out of their home in 97 with the flesh-colored rotary phone still attached to the wall of the kitchen.