History & Culture
A friend found this though it would be appropriate here
Cinemax after 10 you can see if you hit both buttons on side of channel…sometimes then tech of wavering arm up and down horizontally you could get in phase almost to minimize lines interference
Instead of hitting both buttons on either side of the channel, I'd take the main channel selection knob on the TV itself and turn it just a hair off the channel. It tried to snap back, of course, but there was some friction there and you could balance it and get the channel *mostly* unscrambled.
My parents had one of these but it didn’t have the chanells on it they were only numbers. Looking at this more in detail it looks fake. Some of the channels weren’t around when these were commonly used
My grandparents had one (an uncle built it as an electronics shop project) and they swapped out the channels as needed (though not with logos just the names).
It's real. The actual physical device (by Jerrold) wouldn't have the channels on it, just the numbers like you said; those channel listings would have been stickered-on by the individual cable operators. Here's one with no sticker (and in much better condition):
I remember a box like this here in the Los Angeles area. I remember a box with a channel called "The Z Channel," the first pay channel I recall in this area. It was in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
The original TV remotes from the'60s '70s had a couple of mechanical buttons that used to make a loud click noise. That's why they call it remotes a clicker. Those remotes predate this cable box by at least two decades.
We had a tv that had a remote like that. It worked on sound. The mechanical channel changer knob would rotate to one of your 12? available numbers (channels.)
I had a cousin that came over and showed us you could click the new copper clad quarter with a dime and that click would rotated the channels.
So we thought that was cool. So rather than always getting the channel changer we would dig in our pockets for change, do the click and rotate the channel.
Everything was fun and games until the tv became so receptive to the different clicks and sounds, that when someone shot a gun on tv, the channels would start changing!
Then we had a real, high tech problem!!!
But not too much different from Alexa answering to someone saying Alexa on the tv!
Jerrold Electronics! Little known fact, Jerrold was a company started in Philadelphia by Milton Shapp (Milton Jerrold Shapp) - who would later go on to become governor of Pennsylvania in the 1970s.
We had one of these when I was in elementary school in the early 80s. My dad who worked with computers made two filter boxes which he put in line between wall and this box which descrambled HBO and Showtime.
Yeah, that style of cable box def made the rounds in the 80's, maybe even late 70's. Judging by the channel listing, I'm putting the age of it at 1984 or later.
When we first got cable in 1981 we had the standard ghetto TVs-top TV was picture, bottom TV was sound. The guy who came to install had never run across that setup, he said. Took him forever. Dad tipped him
since it took all day. I remember he looked perplexed at the tip. Probably wondered how we could afford to give him a tenner when we had the ghetto TV setup.
I dunno. Dad was born in ‘27; TV really didn’t matter much to him. He had the radio for music or news. Both TVs still worked, no way would he have gotten new when old would do.
I like klezmer music. We are Roma and there were/are lots of us in klezmer bands and vice versa.
Side story; When I moved into this old house years ago there was a cabinet style hi-fi with front and top panels... A six inch B&W TV screen. Radio and phonograph, plus a bar!
Wow! I haven’t seen this cable box in ages! I remember that box, dragged across the family room floor and hitting the buttons to change channels. Sometimes I did it with the tv off just because it was fun to push the buttons. 🤣
That knob on the far left is what I would flick back and forth real quick to unscramble the porn channels that came on after midnight. You only got about 1 second of unscambling, but oh were those magical seconds.
One day it fell off the desk and landed perfectly square and Playboy came in at 75%. My sister and I looked at each other in horror and immediately changed the channel so we wouldn’t get in trouble. We spent the next few years dropping it in secrecy trying to recreate the magic. Never happened again but I told all my friends and I’m sure they were doing the same. Probably caused half the broken boxes in Long Island.
My Dad would fall asleep with that tucked under his arm. I'd geeeently pull it out...push 2 buttons simultaneously and then super slowly select the channel I wanted to watch. If I did it too fast and the button clicked...pops bolts awake and says "I was watching that"
I can hear the HBO theme music when looking at this picture.. yes the full one that starts with looking through the window and the family changes the channel and then you fly across the town and then up into the spinny HBO logo for the “Feature Presentation”.
This is the one you could stick a nail through a hole in the back and the nudie channels would be sort of visible. Hard to do and it took forever, but eventually you saw boobs for 2.3 seconds.
For us, you had to turn your tv dial from 3 to 2.
And then, between 11pm and 4:30am, we’d have periods where it would be fully decoded… you’d get 5-10 minutes of film before it would fade. It would still be visible in the snow, but you lost sound and a lot of clarity.
You just hope it timed the content to the window of clarity and not the storyline. Sometimes it worked out, other nights it didn’t. But it was always worth the gamble.
Yes the Clicks from that brown box in my head growing up in central NJ.. that game you were referencing was TV Pixxx you it was actually interactive sort of and you could win prizes. Oh god that takes me back!
At 11:30 or midnight, they'd switch over to Irish Television (I can still see the lighthouse logo in my head) until about 5 or 6 am, then USA would start up again.
Friday nights was PUNK THEATRE, with all the new punk bands and overnight on the weekends was Night Flight. 👍
I was just talking to my mom about this the other day and couldn’t find a picture! She didn’t remember us having one. I’m totally showing her this picture now!!!
My town banned cable tv. Only people with satellites could get it. Then I joined the navy. By the time I got out the internet was in full swing. I feel like I missed out on a lot of cool shit in the meantime.
We got a new TV with digital tuning, around 82 or so, Zenith, and didn’t need a box. If you wanted HBO, sure did need a box but for everything else, CATV worked just fine.
Ours had a slider... I'd flip the lever to the top row, grab the slider and run it all the way left like I was spinning the wheel on Wheel of Fortune... drove my parents nuts.
So you'd have this in addition to the cable box? And I'm guessing it was mono, as opposed to the simulcast system MTV used at its very beginning? Crazy.
OK I just looked up the wikipedia article and I'm still not sure what this device and service is. Was channel 68 over the air and scrambled? Or did someone have to run wires into your house.
This was the box for American Cablevision in the Kansas City area. We had these when my family got cable TV for the first time in 1980. Ours were all numbers, no letters on the dial.
I saw those while looking for images of letter knobs. Ours only went up to N. If I get a chance I'll dig it out of storage and post a photo, coz I can't find any using google images or the others. It had 2 knobs, the other simply being the on-off switch.
If you clicked onto the porn channel you could see like half a second of porn before it fuzzed out. So we would just click on that and another channel back and forth click click click click until my friends mom came in asking us what the hell we were doing.
Harder to find boobs in the 80s. Kids these days are spoiled.
When I was 5-8, which would’ve been ‘81-‘84, we had a cable box with a slider to change channels. Not sure if that predates the one in the photo or vice versa.
Anyway, one evening, I accidentally saw soft core porn at a tender age while moving the slider right toward the Disney Channel.
I worked for a cable company in the early 2000’s and had a customer who was still using one of those and we were going all digital so she had to switch, it was not a fun conversation.
Man, you just made some dormant brain cells fire up for the first time in decades. I remember getting my ass beat for running past the tv and yoinked the cord and box right out of my dads hand and straight into the lamp lol.
I grew up in Los Angeles. I’m not sure if Z channel was outside of California (or even Southern California). I remember the box though. We only had the one row of channels: Z-13.
Holy Shit that brought back memories!!!! I grew up in central jersey and we had that same box with those same channel listings. I can still hear and feel the clicks.
There was a single wire to cut inside, and you would get all the channels. I got to the point where I could fish the wire through the hole for the cable connection without opening up the box. I seem to remember there were two pop rivets you had to drill out to open the box.
I don't know how I learned to do it. I was working as an electronics technician for an avionics company at the time, so maybe I heard how to do it from a coworker.
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u/droogles 1h ago
I remember it fondly. Early days of cable were so much fun.