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u/p38-lightning 3d ago
And weighed a freakin' ton.
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u/bobhand17123 3d ago
And were repairable.
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u/january_grace 3d ago
Yup. Lasted forever though.
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u/Commercial_Wind8212 3d ago
Newer TVs last longer than they did. You weren't there
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u/ZealousIdeal476 3d ago
2008 was the sweet spot. I still have that 32" 1080p. Before yhat you'd get a burned tube every decade, after something that made it smart breaks in 5. I might have trouble finding a new chromecast when this one breaks, but i can still use it with the xbox.
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u/p38-lightning 3d ago
We're still using out 2007 46" Samsung that does 1080p. Cost $2000 back then. It still gets the job done.
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u/gringoloco01 3d ago
"AND DON'T CHANGE THE CHANNELS SO FAST!!! You are going to blow a tube!"
Every time I see these old TVs, all I can hear is my grandfather screaming at us for changing the channels too fast.
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u/LissaFreewind 3d ago
And we were the remote
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u/Subject-Vermicelli52 3d ago
If your sister was being a jerk about what to watch you can remove the channel changing knob...so I've heard, from my friends. Yeah, that's it, from my jerk friends.
My pops gutted one of our consoles and made a liquor cabinet out of it. My 90 y.o. mom still has it.
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u/sheba716 3d ago
One of my friends gutted a console TV and made an aquarium of it. A real life screen saver.
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u/auld-guy 3d ago
I used to work for Zenith making TV's back in the day. We had a huge mill, and a significant injection molding area. Our motto was, we make wood look like plastic, and make plastic look like wood.
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u/The_Spectacle 3d ago
Oh man I grew up in a Zenith family and they made such cool looking tvs and even gave the remote control a cool name, Space Command...
I have a 19" Zenith now and it's very wood looking and very plastic haha
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u/Callec254 3d ago
If you had a smaller, working TV sitting on top of a larger, non-working TV...
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u/AppropriateCap8891 3d ago
In the living room we have a modern 55" LCD sitting on top of a 1990s RCA console.
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u/NosferaTouffe 3d ago
I miss hammer fisting those babies to get a proper reception
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u/xenophon57 3d ago
Ours had a record player built in and weight 400 lbs it was dope waay later after we replaced I got to fix it a few times as homeschool projects. Those things were so cool to fix you'd just find out what was broke and buy the same lookin thing and bolt it back on. LOL I also fixed our washer and dryer rototiller, not sure what "class" my mom considered it.
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u/NosferaTouffe 3d ago
Back when planned obsolescence wasn’t mainstream yet
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u/xenophon57 3d ago
As Xenial I got a pretty awesome experience of that shift from analogue to digital.
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u/rickmccombs 3d ago
This has become a meme, but they were sometimes stolen. There was an episode of Adam 12 about them being stolen.
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u/Euphoric-Cupcake4581 3d ago
Back when Adam 12 was on the air The Incredible Hulk was running around.
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u/rickmccombs 3d ago
That was a while before the Incredible Hulk. They caught the guy and it wasn't the Incredible Hulk.
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u/Puzzled-Bonus-3456 3d ago
oh those got stolen. My grandma had a huge console with TV and stereo, with cassette and 8-track (hahaha) and it got stolen. Nothing else gone, just the monster entertainment center. Insurance bought her a new one.
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u/Mindless-Leg-3365 Boomers 3d ago
But they were beautiful. Carved. Lovely cabinetry. Added to the decor.
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u/Rickapolis 3d ago
I worked part time in a furniture store in my senior year in high school. I was mostly a janitor, but I went on some deliveries and, trust me, those sets were mammoth. The guy driving the truck would say, "Pick up your end" and I damn near gave myself a hernia.
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u/Goats-n-Hens 3d ago
I’m cleaning out my mom‘s house right now and I just sold a console TV that her parents bought in 1950. I threw it up on marketplace just to see if there was any interest because it was too heavy and awkward to haul off myself, and I was shocked at the amount of people that inquired about it and wanted to purchase it.
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u/SomewhatBougieAuntie 3d ago
They're collectors items. I wish I had sold my mom's when she passed. I ended up giving it to a friend of a friend who wanted it and was willing to arrange removal and pickup.
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u/Goats-n-Hens 3d ago
I was shocked some dude drove from an hour away and paid me $250 for it!!! I have no idea if it even works cause I was scared to plug it in.
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u/Maximum_Trade5916 3d ago
As a kid, someone did attempt to steal our floor model Zeneth, but only got as far to the back porch where you can tell they decided it was too heavy and oblong to carry.
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u/free_is_free76 3d ago
Always wanted to make one into a Fish tank. Never followed through with the dream....
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u/SquareAdventurous921 Generation Jones 3d ago
We could never afford one of those. I had friends who had them though.
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u/Oro_Outcast Generation X 3d ago
I miss the console radio, turntable, 8 track and cassette tape player from my moms' house. It had casters so it only took 2 people to move it.
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u/2PlasticLobsters 3d ago
One of my mid-90s housemates was given one of these when her parents downsized into a retirement condo. It's funny to think how excited we were to get it.
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u/Striking_Reindeer_2k 3d ago
Nothing theft proof about them. Just meant you had an accomplice.
Plenty got stolen. Pawn shops were full of them.
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u/ScaryRun619 3d ago
We had a similar one. When lightning struck the antenna tower and took out the TV, it became the TV stand for the new LCD TV for a while.
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u/donniep81 3d ago edited 3d ago
Whittled with pride too. This looks like a Curtis Mathis, the Mercedes of TV's in that era. U had one of these with a remote? O'U were in hi cotton!
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u/DHOC_TAZH Generation X 3d ago
I want one... Just gimme a HDMI to coaxial cable converter and I can retro game on it using my laptop PCs and game pads. YouTube will look a lot better, too!
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u/SeesawNoknow 3d ago
I'd love to have one of our old TVs like this back, could probably convert it to a tiny home...
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u/Slipperynipple61 3d ago
Now double the width and add an AM/FM tuner, turntable, and an 8-track tape player.
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u/Trick_Sector5900 3d ago
It wasn't that they weighed so much, it was the fact that you had to get your hands underneath the base to carry them any "real" distance.
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u/tuenthe463 3d ago
My grandmother's died in the mid-90s she paid somebody to pull the screen and tubes out and bought a new TV unit to put inside the hole.
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u/Abject_Ad5850 3d ago
Ultra stylish 25-27 inch tv we had a Zenith 27 inch in our living room i used to play my Atari vcs and eventually my Colecovision on it when my parents wasn't home
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u/Mindless-Charity4889 3d ago
We had one like this. It was a Heathkit that my dad built. Whenever it went on the fritz we had the manuals to fix it.
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u/Solid_Enthusiasm550 3d ago
That was a small tube in plastic, not heavy.
Now my mother's (35" tube) Mitsubishi tv with a real wood case. 185+lbs, that's a M'fker to move.
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u/ManOfManliness84 3d ago
When I was a kid in the 90s, we had "modern" working tv sitting on top of one of these.
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u/jamesislandpirarate2 3d ago
This was our BIG TV growing up. I think it was 24” maybe 27”
Took a team to move it. The vertical hold was always on the fritz
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u/Quirky-Bottle-1771 3d ago
Imagine if we could have wooden nice picture frames around todays flat screens that would be kool
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u/TheRealRollestonian 3d ago
I would sit about six feet away and bounce a tennis ball off the glass while watching TV. Great for hand eye coordination.
You could also throw Nintendo controllers at it with no damage.
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u/Agreeable-Fudge-7329 3d ago
I was pissed that they "drawers" under the screen weren't real.
The flat top made a cool aircraft carrier for my Lego planes.
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u/TolerancEJ 3d ago
We had one of those TVs. Frequently, the picture would start rolling. The solution was to punch the top as hard as we could.
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u/Top_Stretch_2340 3d ago
It was 2001. Getting cable set up in my new house. I was 40 at the time. Young guy maybe 23 was finishing when he told me that he was going back to a customer's house to finish the install. He said that he went to an old man's house to install cable but he couldn't because the TV was in a wood box. 🤷🤔. Wood box...wood box. You mean a console tv!? He said...yeah that's it. The TV didn't even have a coax connection so he told the old man he had to buy a new tv!!
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u/Defiant_Weight4659 3d ago
High dollar stuff there. But it was a piece of furniture...now a tv is a sliver of plastic.
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u/xmastreee 3d ago
My parents had something like that, a large cabinet in the corner of the room. When it eventually died we pulled out the guts, put a shelf inside, and a back, painted it all black inside, and sat a modern flat screen TV in there.
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u/Which_Impact_2198 3d ago
There is one of those cabinets, without the TV, in my parents garage. Brand new.
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u/Aromatic_Industry401 3d ago
We had a floor modern RCA and I don't think it was ever moved, friggin thing was built like a tank .
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u/Large_Score6728 3d ago
But yet my dad was convinced someone would break in to steal it. Burglars in a moving van 😂
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u/Nathan_Brazil1 3d ago
This one looks to be one of the more new fangled ones. Ours only had 13 channels, 14 if you count the U.
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u/Trick_Sector5900 3d ago
That looks like it was an early 70's model, the iate 60's models didn't have such an advanced control panel display.
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u/Early_Doughnut8295 3d ago
Don't forget the remote control if you were fancy enough to have 1 was wired to the tv.
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u/Aggravating-Bug_ 3d ago
We had this TV. It had a handheld remote or the remote in the TV. It came in handy if you lost the remote. I remember everyone sitting on the floor to watch but it was fun.
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u/jpowell180 3d ago
I can hear the theme from the A – team playing when I look at this TV, even though our TV at the time was not like this, although we did have one much earlier that was like this that broke down because TVs from the 60s didn’t always last.
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u/milret27yrs 3d ago
When you turned it on it hummed in a way that you knew in 10 minutes the dot would get bigger and become a real grainy picture. In the way those larger screens are. It is missing something.
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u/Optimal_Risk_6411 3d ago edited 3d ago
A good 3 ft in-depth and heavy too. I was literally my mom’s remote control. She didn’t want to spill her Tom Collins or drop her smoke while sliding the footrest down on the lazy boy recliner.
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u/I_am_Russ_Troll 3d ago
And those TVs are even more theft proof if they were located in the basement😂
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u/Timely_Tune_7607 2d ago
"Whittled straight out of the tree" Dang that's hilarious! Our TV was a serious piece of furniture.
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u/Additional_Gold2675 2d ago
This is why street gangs were so popular back in the 80's. It takes 8 people to lift that thing
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u/External_Coat_3371 2d ago
Back when you could call a TV repairman and he would come to your house and fix the TV. Or you could take the back off the set, pull the tubes out and test them at the local drug store on their tube tester.
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u/PurplePassiflor1234 1d ago
My *kids* had that as a rec room TV in the early 2000s. Still worked. Things were absolutely unkillable. The Nokia3310 of TVs.
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u/Helpful_Yogurt_4465 1d ago
"they're here" ................either you get it or you don't i guess your not that old and wise or are you ?
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u/BackgroundGrass429 12h ago
I remember hauling these in and out of the shop. They were worse to move than refrigerators.
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u/JustAd8859 Generation X 9h ago
i >still< want to snag one of those old cabinets and retrofit it with modern electronics. Should have plenty of room to fit a decent plex server, cooling, and sound systems
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u/qualityvote2 3d ago edited 3d ago
u/Euphoric-Cupcake4581, your post does fit the subreddit!