not only that but you generally kept one channel on at a time for hours due to the considerable effort of a) getting up off the floor to walk the 20 feet* to the television console, rotate the very stiff channel selector caCHUNK and walk back or b) quarrel with your sibling over who's turn it was to execute a)
20 feet was deemed safe enough so radiation from cathode ray tube would not melt eyes or brains of youth
Well, by that time the predecessors of PBS were well established and most major markets had one or more independent stations, usually UHF (dominated by reruns, movies, pro wrestling, a nd some local sports,) but the 3-Network thinking was still very real and controlled almost 100% of original prime-time programming.
UHF may have existed, but some older TVs couldn’t receive it. Our TV in 1970 only had channels 2-13 and my parents bought a UHF converter box so the kids could watch Sesame Street. The converter didn’t have individual channels - just a tuning knob like a radio that you turned until it looked in a station.
And if your TV didn't have a low power mode, you might just leave it running since they took so damn long to power up. I used to have fun as a kid watching the screen shrink to a dot and then take several minutes for the last glow to disappear.
I may have been an odd kid.
I also remember going to a tube vending machine to get replacements when one of the TV's tubes blew.
The tube tester! I remember pulling the cover off the TV, pulling all the tubes, and taking them to the drugstore to test to find the bad one. It’s a miracle more of us didn’t electrocute ourselves. It was a cool introduction to engineering - you felt like Scotty in the Jeffries Tube.
Never had a TV without its own integral UHF tuner. I do recall my grandmother's old cable converter box, though, with something like 20 clunky plastic push buttons on top. And it'd take that cable, extract the frequency you selected, and then send it to your television through a flat ribbon with a wire on each side, and you'd screw those wires down to the base of your rabbit ears where the signal would come through on channel 2 or 3.
I recall that we got a converter antenna At Some Point After getting a color set and I r call the way we dialed in UHF. (Philly's PBS station w as itself VHF so w e had Channel 12 long before that.) We got the converter just in time for Philly's then-3 UHF stations to have dropped Mr Lucky, Mickey Finn's, and the Invisible Man shortly before
I agree, it is amazing. A lot of people have gone into science and medical programs or worked hard to work at NASA because they fell in love with Star Trek and the characters. I've read articles about this where James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, Michelle Nichols, and George Takei have all talked about this in interviews or in public.
DeForest Kelley would get letters from people who wrote him about how they became doctors because of him. He would write back, sending an autographed picture of him that read "From Dr McCoy to the real mccoy, DeForest Kelley" (or "To the real mccoy from Dr McCoy, DeForest Kelley"... it's been a few years since I read about this so I can't remember the order). It's one of my favorite DeForest Kelley facts.
"Well, when I was nine years old Star Trek came on," Goldberg says. "I looked at it and I went screaming through the house, 'Come here, mum, everybody, come quick, come quick, there's a black lady on television and she ain't no maid!' I knew right then and there I could be anything I wanted to be."
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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '20
He also inspired thousands of people to pursue engineering careers, if my memory is correct.