Kids today

[DailyDi]

[spoonchicken]

Shag carpet was great ! It looked good, helped insulate cold floors, and it felt good in bare feet ( unless it wasn't recently vaccuumed )

And why was the youngest family member always the human remote control ?

And did anyone elses cats screw up the reception simply by jumping up onto the TV set ?

Even if they didn't touch the rabbit ears antenna, their bodies natural EM field still messed with the reception !

And I don't miss my old "friends", the V-Hold & H-Hold controls LOL

Yeah...I don't miss 70's tech

[Crinklz Kat]

The rotating roof antennas!  Turn the knob on the base unit on your TV to aim it towards the station you wanted to watch.

[maly]

Here in the UK we had three channels, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. Also that little dot in the middle of the screen when you turned the tv off.

Maly.

[beallucanb]

I grew up with 3 TV stations until PBS came on the air then we had a whole 4 with nothing on it.

I did have multi-color shag in my bedroom, and 4 fuzzy stations to watch until the weather change then they got worse.

To get around TV problems, I entertained myself more often,  wearing footed PJ's.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

Yeah: But there were compensations. Comic books cost 10 cents and you actuall READ them and you actualy COULD read them. flying toy airplanes could be had for 5-25 cents and the Saturday movie kids' show cost 25 cents to get in and lasted for 4 hours with tons of different thngs.

I can just imagine the Gen Z'er confronted with a book, trying to open it, not finding the OK and Cancel buttons and being totally flummoxed

[Glennie]

back in my day I was the tv remote.. hey kid go change the channel.. so I would go stand next to the tv set and flip the channel until the adult would say.. thats good right there

[Stroller]

When I was little we didn't have a television - I had to go to my friend's house.  When we got one a bit later there were 2 channels, and tuning in involved using a rotary knob to tune in to the frequency by trial and error.  And they were so unreliable that most people, including us, rented rather than bought them.  Happy days...

[oznl]

I  can remember as a kid we lived in an Australian rural area periodically for my father's work.  Two channels but the ABC (Government network) channel was just a test pattern for most of the day (why they felt the need to leave the transmitter powered up for hours on end when they had no programming was as big a mystery to me then as it is now but some of the music was cool).  When we were done with the test pattern, we only had to sit through 20 minutes or so of cattle prices at the market before the cartoons would start.

It was all B&W.  Australia didn't get colour TV until 1975.

19 minutes ago, Stroller said:

When I was little we didn't have a television - I had to go to my friend's house.  When we got one a bit later there were 2 channels, and tuning in involved using a rotary knob to tune in to the frequency by trial and error.  And they were so unreliable that most people, including us, rented rather than bought them.  Happy days...

Do you still have Government "TV detector vans" patrolling the streets looking for unlicensed TVs?  If so, I wonder how they work these days?  Back in the 70s, an analog TV made so much EMF that detecting it from the street was technically trivial.  I'd expect that a modern flat-screen, solid-state digital TV would have a much lower EMF signature and that it would be indistinguishable from a computer.

[DiaperboyEddie12]

16 hours ago, DailyDi said:

Been there done that.  I sat close to the TV when I was growing up.  So I was the channel changer.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

16 hours ago, DailyDi said:

Oh; you poor baby!, not only did  we only have 3 stations, but we did not even have shag carpets in 1950, We did not even hav TV tables, frozen dinners or integrated TV sets The antenna was on the roof and a huge affair and we had a "booster" which was a kind of amplifier and IT WASN'T EVEN FREAKING COLOR! All we had to entertain ourselves with were the on-off/volumne, channel select/fine tune, brightness, contrast V-hold and h-hold (and the last three were controlled from the outer limits), not the 40 odd buttons that you have today. The programs were abysmal: The morning "school" program was a real ding-dong operation. We actually used to GO OUT AND PLAY!! Jesus Fuckin' Christ did I have a deprived childhood! who do I sue?1?!!

[rusty pins]

I well remember all of it, but when my dad used to tell me about things when he was young, I would put it in perspective.  Sure a movie only costs .25 to .35 cents back then, but your hourly salary back then was maybe .50 cents an hour if lucky.  Same with a nickle pack of gum or a .10 cent comic book.  Reality is you can't have 1940 prices in a 2022 world.  Inflation is terrible now, but it has been for many years.  Even though it's the worst it has been in 40 years, wages have not been keeping up with the rate of inflation for decades.

By the way, remember when we had to use a key to unlock our cars, a crank to roll down the windows, a car radio with only AM stations (let alone no tape or CD player), having an attendant pump your gas, check your oil and clean your windshield?  How about a back seat with enough room to really stretch your legs out?  How about a bike that had only one speed?  Roller skates with metal wheels and a key to adjust them?  Your calculator was a slide rule.  Ice cube trays you had to manually fill with water and put in your freezer compartment.  Actual gifts instead of gift cards.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

Back then, a single paycheck supported a family of 4, Overall, taxes took much lessof a bite, in fact, it is taxes that have risen the most disproportionally

As for the cars Crank windows were more robust since you didn[t have to go anywheire but in that door pane if it went bad. For all it's shortcomings, the old readios were less of a distraction, you could feel your way around the controls without having to take your eyes off the road and the side vents means that you did not need air conditioning and that expense. The cars today look squat and, withrare exception, ugly not to mention the lesson we have not learned about too many chips. Also the damn radios weren't so loud that the low-IQ kids could not disturb folks in the Andromeda Galaxy. In short, cars were for driving, not being a rolling coke club full of distractions. The mid to late '60s were the height of the care culture, before the government stepped in and screwed everything up (as is their wont)

 

[AbabeBill]

I experienced most of the aforementioned TV agonies growing up, limited programming hours & channels, black & white, bad reception, being the remote, and more. I was somewhat lucky, in that my dad was a big tv fan, we couldn’t afford the newest or best equipment, but it was a have to have appliance. So, when my dad, mom, older sister didn’t have their program on, the tv was mine! Eventually, we got a secondhand “color” television! Yes! And then, we got THIS, 

That’s it! Yes, cable tv. My dad went for it, and the extra expense, because the reception was well, exceptional. And you got lots more channel choices. And a new thing, HBO (Home Box Office) Which came free, at first. I believe my parents cable bill back then was $14-16, Mid 1970’s. I remember when HBO became an extra charge, you could still cheat it, by pushing in the 2 buttons on either side of the HBO channel button ?

That was a fairly great time, for home tv. Just don’t trip over the cable box cord!!! ? And by the way, the adult porn channels were starting up then too. At first, it was the same, press the 2 buttons, and voila! You got free (soft core) porn!!! ? 

Were those the days? 

[ValentinesStuff]

23 hours ago, DailyDi said:

I had it worse, it was uphill both ways.

 

It was fun though, when the picture went wonky, we'd pull off the back panel and look at the diagnostic chart, remove the vacuum tubes indicated, go to the hardware store to test them, then got replacements, put it all back together, and it would work until another tube went out.

[rusty pins]

142 channels and you still can't find anything good to watch!

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

3 hours ago, rusty pins said:

142 channels and you still can't find anything good to watch!

That is why I am either on YouTube or ME-TV, I can  still watch Carol Burnett or Hogan's Heroes or the Stooges or some other shows that I like and there is ALWAYS this:

https://solie.org/alibrary/index.html

[zzyzx]

16 hours ago, rusty pins said:

Your calculator was a slide rule.

Was your slide rule circular or straight?  <GRIN>

[Stroller]

3 hours ago, zzyzx said:

Was your slide rule circular or straight?  <GRIN>

I can't speak for rusty pins, but I had both circular and straight slide rules.  The straight one was my dad's old one from the 40s.  I didn't use them much though.  Slide rules were for scientists and engineers, whereas I was a mathematician.  Mathematicians used log tables.

On 4/4/2022 at 8:33 AM, oznl said:

Do you still have Government "TV detector vans" patrolling the streets looking for unlicensed TVs?

No we don't.  They assume everyone has a device capable of picking up transmissions these days, so the vans are long gone.  If you haven't got a television you've got a serious mountain to climb to persuade them to stop chasing you to pay.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

A "slide rule" calcuator is a calculator that performs functions that, prior to their existence were accessed by a slide rule, such as trig functions and geomtric functions. I had one of the first, a Texas Instruments SR-50, with which you could do statistical functions like Correlation and Regression and Analysis of Vaniance. Later slide rule calculators did some of the functions automtically. These also did scientific and engineering functions. Hewlett-Packard put out a number of them. There are a few android once for phones, like RealCalc, These are "virtual" Calculators

RUFFLES & RIBBONS GIRLS' HOME has a vitrual calculator that includes a slide rule. It was designed before the 16:9 and is a bit old and I do not know if it will work for boys

http://sandralyn.net/getcalc.html

 

 

 

 

[rusty pins]

Actually, I never had a slide rule in the old-style sense, but my brother did way before electronic calculators.  I do have a round one in my flight case for calculating wind speeds and cross wind components, but I have an electronic one that does it as well (haven't flown solo in over 25 years now).

[Cute_Kitten]

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

The BEST thing was that we had REAL diapers; not jumped-up Handi-Wipes

[zzyzx]

18 hours ago, Stroller said:

I can't speak for rusty pins, but I had both circular and straight slide rules.  The straight one was my dad's old one from the 40s.  I didn't use them much though.  Slide rules were for scientists and engineers, whereas I was a mathematician.  Mathematicians used log tables.

I believe I still have both of my parent's straight slide rules (both engineers).  And I think I still have both my cheap straight and also my circular slide rule buried some place.  And you might have used a written table that my grandfather helped produce.  (He generated one page in one of the old books.)

[spark]

9 hours ago, rusty pins said:

Actually, I never had a slide rule in the old-style sense, but my brother did way before electronic calculators.  I do have a round one in my flight case for calculating wind speeds and cross wind components, but I have an electronic one that does it as well (haven't flown solo in over 25 years now).

My dad is an engineer, and he taught me how to use a slide rule.  There wasn't any purpose other than the parlor trick, because by the time I needed that level of math- we had scientific calculators.   It's the difference in our ten years of age.  By the time I was I was old enough to need one we had calculators that could do the same thing.  Now we have phones that can graph functions.