this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Mildly Infuriating
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That's a false belief that keeps getting spread, cable TV started as the same channels with clear reception instead of having to rely on antennas, so no people didn't pay not to have ads, they paid to be able to have a good reception of the same channels then had access to for free with bad reception, then some exclusive channels started appearing without commercials, but it wasn't the norm.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/7wxRbKq9Dj
And it's funny that you're talking about "the early days" since it started in 1948 and I'm willing to bet that you weren't born.
I mean, I’m not going off a belief, I actually lived this.
Yes, the clear reception vs bunny ears was awesome, but that was also limited on televisions like this, and I’m talking specifically about the content.
My family were always early adopters of technology (I started gaming in ‘79 with both the Intellivision and Atari – Intellivision was far superior). We had HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime as soon as they were available.
I’m talking about the late 70s and early 80s when they were commercially available to the masses and the cable wars began.
The late 70s were absolutely the early days of commercial cable tv.
This is my recollection as well; I was a young adult at the time.
Cable was ABSOLUTELY supposed to be ad-free. Ad-free, and local access so that anyone could have their own show. That was the tradeoff to get people away from the big three (ABC, CBS, NBC) at the time. There were literally no ads.
But it didn't last long at all. Local stayed ad-free for much longer; anything national came with ads embedded. Even the very first day of MTV had ads.
And before anyone screeches at me about what link said what, forget it. I'm not interested in reading text about how the 60s and 70s were supposed to have taken place written by people don't even know what it means to unplug or hang up a phone, or why anyone would even do that, or what green stamps were, or what happens when you lie on the floor with your head between two speakers listening to Pink Floyd, lol.
LillyPip is factually correct. You should be listening to them instead of trying to retcon history for them.
I’d forgotten how much I should miss this.
e: also
This is what made Bob Ross a thing in the early 80s.
And before anyone screeches at me about what link said what, forget it. I'm not interested in reading text about how the 60s and 70s were supposed to have taken placeCheck any sources on cable TV history, it's all the same. Just because you decide to ignore it doesn't make it false, it just proves your ignorance.
Here, since you "don't want to read", this one has a nice graphic that should make it easy for your brain ☺️
https://www.cablecompare.com/blog/the-complete-history-of-cable-tv
The late 70s were absolutely the early days of commercial cable tv.I provided a source with more sources, no it wasn't.
Need more? There:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television_in_the_United_States
First phrase:
Cable television first became available in the United States in 1948.The majority of channels has commercials, the ones you paid extra for (like HBO) didn't, they weren't the majority and the point of paying for cable wasn't too remove ads, you still had them on the majority of the channels because they were the same as what you got with antennas.
You're not the only one who lived it buddy, you just don't remember it properly.
How old are you?
I don’t need links to tell me what this was like when I vividly remember.
Yea, cable television first became available in 1948. Regular middle class families did not have cable television for a long time after that.
Mobile phone service was available in 1959. Guess how many people had it? A good friend of my family had a car phone in the mid 70s. Guess how common that was?
You can’t go by invention dates on stuff like this. You’ll be amazed at how long some things take to gain market acceptance.
So far I'm the only one providing sources, an anecdote of when you were a kid isn't reliable.
The majority of channels had ads because, again, they were just the same channels as without cable. Cable exclusive channels weren't a thing before 1970 (when there's was 10m subscribers already) and ads on a cable exclusive channel first started in 1977 with nearly all of them having ads in the in the 80s.
7 years of commercial free cable exclusive channels that were a minority of channels available at the time. No, people weren't paying not to see adverts and no it wasn't the point of cable TV like you said, the point of creating cable TV was to allow people to reliably watch TV by broadcasting the signal in a way that wasn't affected by all sorts of elements out of the control of the broadcasters.
Why are you so bent about this?
Again, how old are you? Do you actually remember this time? I gave one anecdote, but ask literally anyone my age and they’ll say the same. You certainly know people my age, don’t take my word for it, ask them what sleepovers were like before and after cable tv became a thing. Everyone my age remembers a massive shift, especially with Showtime.
With/without cable wasn’t an easy change. Lots of people didn’t accept it easily because it seemed technically complex. That’s part of why my family was an early adopter: my dad was an aerospace engineer, so it was a no-brainier.
The televisions sold in the late 70s were not set up for cable, so you needed a cable box and to configure your tv a certain way – typically by setting one of your two dials to channel 2, 4, or I think UHF 12 (?it’s been a while, but it depended on your tv, and you’d have an auxiliary dongle, too), you had to plug a cable box into your tv (which was nowhere near as simple as now), and then maybe sacrifice a goat. I joke, but the wiring out of the back of those things wasn’t easy. It wasn’t clear ports with matching inputs, but more like in the back of old school audio speakers, but more of them.
That doesn’t sound hard, but for most people the tv was a magic box that pictures came out of. These were your grandparents, they weren’t good at technology.
In the late 80s, yeah. That’s after what I’m talking about. It sounds like you’re talking about the era of Nickelodeon and the height of Showtime/Cinemax porn. I’m talking about more than a decade before that.
Yes, by that point, cable had settled into the subscription + ad model I’m saying was the down slide. I’m talking about way before that, when it hadn’t yet devolved.
Again, I’m not making this up, and I kinda wonder what you think my motivation would be to do so, but I’m very curious how old you are and if you’re just going on things you’ve read or if you were alive for this.
e: clarification
Can confirm, lol. And for cable you had to have coax from the wall to the cable box, and again from the cable box to an adapter that went into one of the existing ports. Later, you plugged your cable box coax straight into the TV, but that was late 80s if I remember correctly. Waaaaay before "Skinemax", lol.
And even then not everyone had cable. It was an added expense, and there was a LOT more going out for entertainment because it was cheap and affordable. For example, I saw The Police in 1983 for $15 general seating (still prevalent in the southeast even after The Who thing in Ohio in 1979) and I saw many shows in exactly the same way: Asia, Loverboy, even the Stones. In the 70s dance was HUGE, as were bicycles and skateboards, and then later in the 80s you had malls and bowling and mini golf and whatever blew your skirt up. Pandemic aside, this thing where everyone stays inside and never goes out is the exact opposite of how it was then, so you saved your money for what YOU wanted to do, which was rarely sit home and watch TV. In my group of friends, among a dozen of us or so, maybe two had cable in the early 80s, but that grew, especially with MTV.
As an aside, I have to ask: Did you ever get sent up to the roof by your parents after a storm to reset the antenna? Or be the unpaid holder of the rabbit ears by the TV, moving this way and that so your old man could watch his game with the least amount of snow and rolling horizontal lines? I did.
I was a weird nerd, and some of my fondest memories are helping my dad do engine work on our wood-sided station wagon (I was such a cliché) and going with him to the tv shop to pick up vacuum tubes for the tv after a loud pop and faint waft of smoke, then shimmying ass-upwards on the wall like spider man to hold the flashlight at the correct angle whilst my dad pulled the particle-board (I think, maybe cardboard) back off the television and taught me what every single part inside did.
Best time of my young life, hands down.
e: I’ve never been afraid of technology or learning things in my adult life. Thanks, dad.
(And if you’re raising your child like this, thank you. You’re helping to make good people that way.)
That is so cool. I learned those things, but only after I left. Started on TRS-80s ("trash 80s") with the heavily armored clacky keyboard and then got into early PCs. I still remember Pong, lol.
Speaking of which, it was probably masonite or some kind of hard board on the back of the tv; it's older than you think, and was on the back of a lot of those wonderful Art Deco radios of the 30s and 40s even before it was on the backs of televisions. The tv we had when I was a young kid was almost the size of a couch, so I have no idea what was on the back of it because I could never have moved it. But I remember the vacuum tubes, radios had those as well. And plugging a bad fuse with a penny, which probably wasn't the best idea in the world but everybody did it.
(We had the faux-wood sided station wagon too, lol. Or maybe it was real wood? I don't know. It was just genuine ugly.)
Oh yeah! Exactly! Mine was very similar to this, but a bit narrower. It was a behemoth, plus the cord was very short.
Thus the shimmying ass-upwards to hold the torch. There was scant space back there, and making more was work.
I think you’re right. It was a dark, dense, and very thick board, but not actual wood. I had a radio or clock or something with the same backing, now you mention it. I hadn’t paid much attention except it was thicker than the ikea shit, lol.
Wait, what? I completely missed that growing up.
Brb.
Missing it might also be why you actually made it all the way to adulthood, lol. It's dangerous as hell, but it's something people used to do on knob and tube wiring in old houses. Codes changed after any number of fires, and they actually made a change to how circuit breakers were built so it wouldn't work anymore, but essentially a fuse was a round thing that had two (I think?) wires crossing the center; if those overloaded they simply burnt out and that was the mechanism of circuit breaking. The hole in the center was exactly the size of a penny, and copper is an excellent conductor, and people put more and more appliances on house wiring that had not been upgraded since the dawn of electricity so they didn't have available power, but they usually did have a penny.
If you lived in a new(er) house you probably never saw this, but for those of us in older neighborhoods and post WWII starter houses saw a lot of it. You were supposed to replace it as soon as you could (this was in the days of actually going to the hardware store and buying it in person during business hours) but shit happens, people forget, and houses go boom. So they stopped making it so that anyone could do that at all, which is probably a good thing.
God, yeah, that tv console, lol. That one is solid 70s, with the dark finish and heavy pseudo-Spanish turned posts; I think ours was a good eight or ten years older because it was more mid-century modern, blonde wood with sort of gold/beige fabric screen over the speakers, but yeah. That pic gave me a good chuckle, thanks.
And listening to good music with your head stuck between two physical speakers is almost mystical. They also produced it, specifically, for stereo as well as for listenability on little transistors, so there was a lot of thought given behind the scenes to those notes hopscotching across brain cells from left to right and back again. It's meditative is what it is: thinking about nothing else, nowhere you had to be, maybe a little bored, and putting your head between the speakers. Pink Floyd was awesome that way, but so was a lot of music: everything from Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra to Kiss to Wild Cherry, whatever you got your groove on. It's a holy thing.
BTW, I think your detractor is probably too scared to take me on lest they get hit with an avalanche of reminiscences and maybe a game of "what's this?" with a pic or two of a 45 record adapter or something, lol. As well they should be. Thanks for making me think of these things. Those were good times.
Christ on a bike, don’t say shit like that to me – my house was built in 1886. O.o
Just keeps getting worse from there. Some outlets in this place have seen all the world wars.
There are more efficient ways to give me a heart attack, you know.
I think you’re right. I was sticking around for the next volley of meme-facts, but it looks like the match has been called. :)
You will know if your house has knob and tube: go up to the attic or down into the basement, and look for exposed wiring. Chances are excellent you have a mix of older and newer wiring, if it was not upgraded after the mid-80s or so. I couldn't tell you exactly when myself, but at some point municipalities started moving away from a "pull it onto the lot, plug it in" housing code toward actually requiring that ANY electrical work not be approved unless the entire house was brought up to code.
But save your heart attack for a good steak, because knob and tube is not inherently dangerous. It's what people were doing with it that was winning Darwin Awards. (You could probably do a search for "plugging a fuse with a penny" and see what you get.) I was in a 1948 house in 2015 that still had it: the basic wiring was mostly knob and tube, but the breaker box was modern and it was actually up to code.
So really, no worries about sleeping outside tonight, you still have time to look over your house's paperwork, seen when it was modified (and whether they pulled permits or did it the I-don't-need-no-permits way) and then get a real electrician to look it over for you. Chances are good that you're well within code if you've had any serious remodeling or repair work done within the last 30 years or so. When you find nothing objectively unsafe, try not to hate me for making you look. Just don't stick any loose change into the fuse box, lol.
Apologies for the scare. Did not mean to do that.
EDITED TO ADD: Here's what knob and tube wiring looks like. You may even have newer wiring running right next to older knob and tube, or knob and tube that's still there but not actually connected to anything because someone didn't want to spend an extra half day pulling it out. Your mains/breaker/circuit box is a much better indicator of whether you need to be concerned.
It’s all good, lol.
I’ve been here for 20 years. If this place was gonna immolate me, it’s had plenty of chances.
Thanks for the info about what to look for, though!
I was sticking around for the next volley of meme-facts, but it looks like the match has been called.Sorry if I have to sleep at night I guess?
"Meme-facts"... Sorry if I provide actual sources instead of relying on personal feelings and experience.
BTW, I think your detractor is probably too scared to take me onYou sound just like a COVID denier, hope you realise that? "My experience is true, people who researched the subject and found sources from those in the industry are wrong. Let me got you with anecdotes instead of sources to back my point!"
In the late 80s, yeah. That’s after what I’m talking about.https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/rise-cable-television
https://www.cablecompare.com/blog/the-complete-history-of-cable-tv
https://www.ncta.com/cables-story
No, I'm talking about before the 70s when cable exclusive didn't exist, the only "exclusives" that existed before then was signal from far away local stations that wouldn't otherwise be accessible with regular antennas, but they were still channels available without cable in their local community. Heck, the FCC ended up forcing cable companies to carry local stations!
Also the number of subscribers might have been lower, but the number of TVs too. Cable subscribers before the 70s still represented a high enough portion of TV watchers that local stations put pressure on the FCC to regulate it.
HBO launched in 72, in 1980 there was 28 cable exclusive networks vs a multitude of local stations.
Why are you so bent about this?Because I'm tried of seeing people who were kids or not even born back then pretend that it was better than it truly was. Facts are important and "the point of cable TV was to not have ads" isn't a fact, it's a lie that started from people who remember wrong (or only watched the few ads free channels because they were kids and uninterested in local TV or didn't live it at all) when it's extremely easy to prove the contrary. Heck, your parents would be the ones who could say considering they were the ones who decided to subscribe, not you.