Comment on HBO Max is removing features from my plan without reducing my price.
ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 10 months agoCan 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. I saw The Police in 1983 for $15 general seating. 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.
LillyPip@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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 clické) and going with him to the tv store to pick up vacuum tubes for the tv after a loud pop and faint waft of smoke, then shimmying ass-upward 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 life.
ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.)
LillyPip@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
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.
ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.