Most liked posts in thread: Let me tell you, when I was a kid...

I'll tell ya, things weren't as easy as they are now. Kids don't have a clue of how tough it was back in the 'good old days'. I had to walk 12 feet thru shag carpet just to change the channel on the TV...and there were only 3 channels.

 

Mine too! As a wee lad we had the old console tv with the 13(I think) channels on the dial with the U. Still to this day I have no idea what the U was for.
My younger days were spent roaming the 4-wheeler trails and train tracks when at moms house, at dads I roamed the 60acres of Northern Michigan woods with my dog Sam a golden retriever, st. Bernard mix. Awesome dog, he looked like a giant golden.
I feel like my generation(early 80's babys) was among the last to understand the "good ol' days" and what it meant and felt like to play outside and enjoy it. I contribute that to growing up in Ironwood MI. The town that time forgot

 

Yep 3 networks on the dial and the independent and PBS on UHF.

 

Same here, got to tune the antenna too. It was a workout watching TV back in the day.

 

We had a Zenith 19" "portable". What made it portable was a suitcase handle screwed to the top of its steel case. That sucker weighed a ton and was in no way portable!

 

How many of y'all had a TV with a round screen? Our first...

 

My parents first tv had an almost round screen, made the test pattern look really neat.

 

Test patterns...
I heard 'High Flight' so many times at the close of the broadcast day I had it memorized. It really struck home years later when I got my pilot's license. "Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth..."

 

121.5 and 243.0?

 

UHF channels had the best late night movies. Stuff like Creature Feature and Ghost Host where they'd play old black and white horror flicks.

 

I remember when we got a color TV, and we had this box on top that connected to a motor at the base of our roof-top antenna, so your could turn the antenna for different channels.

CD

 

My dad has always been an early adopter. As my dad climbed the corporate ladder, he could afford things. We had the first central air conditioning in our neighborhood, the first Microwave oven -- a huge Amana RadarRange. My dad had one of those huge bag-phone mobile phones in his 1878 Malibu (company car). He had a Radio Shack TRS80, followed by an Apple 2C, followed by an original Macintosh (I had one of those, too). He now has a 27-inch iMac, an iPad, an iPhone 6, a MacBook Pro, and an Audi A6 3.0T (linked to his iPhone by Bluetooth).

He's 84 years old. And he knows how to use all of that stuff.

CD

 

My dad was similar. Big remote antenna on the roof, the little tone push button remote, and huge VCR. After his first heart attack in '78 he got a Commodore PET to teach himself programming. I got a Lincoln he could talk to but it could understand his Hungarian accent. He had one of the first LED watches. It was a big thing he got in Japan.

 

I got my first digital calculator when I was in Japan in the early 70's. All it could do was the four basic functions and had no memory. Thing was the size of a cigar box. Then I ran the gamut of Commodore computers from the Vic20 (w/cassette tape drive) to Commodore 128. Wrote my first resume after retiring from the USAF on the C128. After a brief foray with Gateway desk and laptop I found my way to the Mac side. Macbook Air I picked up yesterday makes my fourth, and if this one lasts as well as my Pro I won't be getting another any time soon. First computer I ever saw was as a kid when my Grand Dad showed me the computer at The Lane Company. This was back when quality furniture was still made in the US. The thing was literally as big as my house.

 

I remember before the news came on they always played a loop that said " It's 10:00, do you know where your children are", I guess now it might hurt someones feelings, or people don't care.

 

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRKv1wgcuLk"]It's 11:00. Do you know where your children are? - YouTube[/ame]

 

WXYZ, WWJ and WJR were the three t.v. stations in Detroit. CKLW came from Canada for a grand total of four. Today I have 30 times that many and often can't find a thing I care to watch.

 

Spot on. It may be that there is only a finite amount of entertainment available at any given time. If so, then every time a new channel is added to the lineup, that amount of entertainment is diluted. So, if Captain Kangaroo was top shelf entertainment with only 3 channels, the current 2 or 3 hundred have diluted that to what can only be called the lowest common denominator. Just my opinion. Someone might find the shopping channel high adventure, ya never know.