DO NOT attempt to adjust your television set

A dozen channels, in 1962?

Living in a different region, I didn't reach that much choice until the forced TV conversion from analog to digital in 2009.

 

My grandpa used to tell me stories like this.

 

That is a beautiful sentiment.
kris

 

The Big 3, and maybe PBS on a good reception day

 

#firstworldproblems.

Oh...and the federal government actually seized control of all of the airwaves a while back.....like June.....1934.

 

Whaddya mean no remote control in the early 60's? I was the remote control. Mark, change the channel. Mark, tune it in, there's too much snow. Mark, go around back and fix the vertical hold. Mark, turn up the volume. Mark, now it's too loud, turn it down. My hips are worn out to this day. Oh yeah, Mark, carry these vacuum tubes when we go into Ace hardware to test them, and don't break them!!!!

I remember watching the Chicago Blackhawks play hockey. on a little 9" black and white TV. the resolution was so bad you couldn't even see the puck. Bobby Hull, the "Golden Jet" was just a blur on the screen. I guessed he had blonde hair. Stickwork? All in your imagination based on the "color" announcer's narration. But the color narration was way better back then because they had to actually describe what was happening.

Hey, here's what it looked like...



we had these channels in Chicago

2 - CBS
5- NBC
7-WLS
9-WGN
11-PBS
32-WFLD (FOX)

there might have been a foreign language channel on 26 (polish?), but we never watched it.

 

we had 4 channels until we got uhf. that added 2 snowstorms

 

We had:
ch. 2 - WCBS
ch. 4 - WNBC
ch. 5 - WNEW
ch. 7 - WABC
ch. 9 - WOR
ch.11 - WPIX
ch. 13 - WNYC (PBS)

 

the good thing was, there was something worth watching, unlike todays 5 million channels of garbage

 

UHF was channels 14-83, or 70 channels. I grew up with 2 to 4 channels on UHF repeaters, depending on weather. No VHF.

UHF channels have been pared down in several steps, as some blocks are reallocated to other uses.

That is more than I had on the cable system when I moved to WA.

A few years later I fired the cable company, then moved to a place where rabbit ears worked. After later becoming a homeowner and putting up an antenna, I had about the same as you until the 2009 DTV transition, when my count (including sub-channels) suddenly jumped into the 30s. Now it is the 50s.

Meaningful program choice did not expand proportionately.

 

Might have been more of a continuation of the seizures of 1927, 1912, and 1910. I guess one could say having regulations to comply with is a little like government seizing control? Situation in some places might be more like government seizing control.

I could see how a few pre-regulation incidents of prank transmissions sending Navy ships on fake missions could have been annoying though. Also the way if your ship had Marconi radios, you leased it along with a Marconi radio operator who would be under orders not to relay any communications from ships using other equipment.

Somebody must've thought there had to be a better way.

 

I laughed out loud.

 

We were excited in the early 90’s when NBC got a translator so it actually could be viewed most of the time and fox showed up.

as a kid it was always 3.5 channels and on a weekend if I stayed up real late or got up real early I could watch strange distant stations which was a treat.

those were the days.

 

I'm only old enough to be your father, not your grandpa.

 

funny
but my great grampa listened to nothing. There were no radio stations entering his youth in the 1900's. 1/3 of the civil war vets were still alive when he was born. We are ALL not that far removed from the past.

 

And they haven’t let go. Every station license issued by the FCC still has something like this in the fine print:

This license is subject to the right of use or control by the Government of the United States conferred by Section 606 of the Communications Act of 1934.​

Those rights have been used in the past. See, for example, Exec. Order. No. 8694, 6 Fed. Reg. 6367 (Dec. 12, 1941), and on page 6378 in the same issue, FCC Order No. 87, suspending the amateur radio service, in which international communications had already been prohibited by FCC Order No. 72, 5 Fed. Reg. 2161 (June 8, 1940). The contemporary situation is discussed in David W. Opderbeck, Does the Communications Act of 1934 Contain a Hidden Internet Kill Switch? 65 Fed. Comm. L.J. 1 (2013).

 

My step-great-grandpa was a Civil War vet. And he wasn't young then either.

But the reproduction ages along that ancestry path were not typical. Old geezer vet takes young bride as his (2nd? 3rd?) wife. Then a daughter (*) proves that even back before modern medicine, some females successfully delayed reproduction until their 40s. The result was that my step-dad (the one I'm helping provide care for) was born more than a century later than one of his grandparents.

We need not discuss the color of the uniform ...

(*) this is the same person I mentioned elsewhere as being a teacher during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, and told stories of numerous students going home ill and never returning.

 

Nowadays, grandmas/pas can be in their 30's, no sweat!