You could feel the static charge shift when changing channels

TVs had channels?

I'm old enough to remember Saturday morning cartoons, but seriously, it feels like TVs don't really have channels anymore, and instead just have thousands of shitty streaming apps.

Unless you were in Cleveland.....then it was Channel 4.

But I just got comfortable!

The real age here is the "turn" part of the comment.

I'm gen z but just set up tvheadend after unsubscribing from any remaining streaming services. Learning there is free tv over the air was a shock to me

Sometimes I used channel 4 if the signal wasn't working. Coaxials were shitty.

I am this old as well but there's a reason I always have a screwdriver handy

I have that exact model with my 2600!

crumbles into dust

My brother/sister thank you, that takes me back. Had the og Nintendo going through that

I feel simultaneously seen and called out.

Before my time but I did run across these as a kid. Even played a few games, too.

Came here to post this.

Came here to say the same

This was the only thing station included up till and including the fucking Jaguar.

Beat me to it. Life got really good when I could upgrade from the small kitchen B/W set to a color one.

I seem to remember the NES having a similar splitter?

What channel would you use? I always used channel three and swore channel four gave a worse signal.

Jeez. You old! Damn, me too. Nowadays such a device would be 79,99 ans surely sold separately. Without cables of course.

As far as I remember that thing came with the 2600, no?

But did you have separate VHF and UHF connectors on the back?

This is why I have chips out of my shins.

I miss my waterbed

I once signed an apartment rental agreement that had a waterbed addendum, specifically banning their usage.

How did everyone have this exact bed‽

Pretty sure I had that exact water bed frame

Whoa... Not flashing 12:00, check out Linus Torvalds here.

My parents had a b&w TV into the mid 80s.

When they got a colour TV it also coincided with getting a Commodore 64, so naturally they suggested using the old TV for the computer.

Funny thing is that the C64 colour palette was prepared for this. The 16 colours weren't just random picks on the colour wheel, they also functioned as 4 different shades when shown on b&w.

Shortly after we did get the proper monitor but it still had a switch so you could still check how the your graphics looked in b&w.

I totally saw a boob!

Dude, I had that but didn't need it most of the time because on saturday after midnight on the French channels you would always get softcore porn like Emanuelle or something similar. I guess growing up in Quebec had its perks after all. Lol

I can hear this picture

And then you pull too hard on the power button and it comes off and you get hit/yelled at by dad

My TV only had 4 button for 4 channels so once we got more than 4 channels we had to use a small wheel to change frequencies and look for them.

I was the "go find the pliers to turn the channel, cause the knob went missing last year" kid.

You were supposed to sit close enough to the tv to always reach it.

Yo my dad would lay on the couch after work and scream for me or my brother to come change the channel. Those were the fucking days...

SCART was ahead of its time. You could control connected devices with it like HDMI CEC. You could wake up devices through it. You could daisy chain devices together with it. A TV could sent its TV signal down to a SCART connected device from its tuner! No equivalent for this exists today, unless there's TV that do HDMI OUT! By the end, it could do 1080p!

I combined those 3 plugs into this with a small plug.

Ooh, I get to trot out my console humblebragging picture again.

Created in 1954–1956 in wiki is correct

A pain in the arse to drive from modern video sources is what it is! Bought a CRT recently with a thought to using it as a cool secondary monitor but HDMI to composite adaptors are all crap!

What I ended up doing was using HDMI to VGA, then VGA to composite. This let me set a proper 4:3 resolution and the picture improved a lot. What I should have done is not bother with composite at all and gone VGA to RGB to SCART as this would improve the colour a lot, but couldn’t find the adaptors for that. Not sure how widespread SCART was, might have only been a European thing but when I was a kid most TVs could either take a composite RCA input or SCART, and SCART could carry composite or RGB.

Definitely given me the bug for old TVs though, I’m going to have to write an ActivityPub to Teletext software adaptor so I can have Lemmy on a ‘90s TV or something. HackTV looks like a lot of fun as well.

I have the same answer 😅