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.

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

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

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

I feel simultaneously seen and called out.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

I seem to remember the NES having a similar splitter?

Same. Except Atari, and Nintendo too

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.

Pretty sure I had that exact water bed frame

How did everyone have this exact bed‽

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.

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.

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.

I had to get up and hit it on the side with a dead blow hammer when the screen turned green as well.

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...

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

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

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.

Created in 1954–1956 in wiki is correct

I have the same answer 😅

SCART is newer than composite, though..

Channel 3

Definitely had this as well.

I had RF adapters for my NES...

I had to get a new TV since my old one had the two screw posts that the Atari hooked up to.

It makes perfect sense since it is analog, each of them provides signal to a separate device. You had one screen and two speakers.

I don't know, I kinda like that it's 1 cable per device. Definitely easier to troubleshoot audio if a cable is disconnected, versus trying to figure out why my TV isn't passing HDMI 5.1 through the fiber audio output to a wireless transmitter to all the speakers! But maybe I'm old school too...

No left and right video

Rockefeller became the country's first billionaire on 28 September 1916

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller

Remember the warm glow of the yellow/orange street lights? There gone now too, just like the hummingbirds and the fireflies.

(unrelated but boops the kitty)

what do you think is the average age is of those who spend regular time in this specific group?

I see that and raise you computer programs you got from magazines you had to type in for an hour.

Only if they're mismatched from one end to the other. You can use any color cable as long as both ends go in the same color port (eg yellow cable connecting the red ports). Also, you could totally do redPort-whitePort, your Left/Right would just be reversed.

That's old? Try this

I'm literally watching a baseball game with the right picture in the back of my second monitor, and it's plugged into an adapter for the left picture in my PC.

I'm 39.

You know how you think it's better to keep them, just in case?

It is.

https://m.media-amazon.com/...

1930s

Introduced in the 1930s by the Radio Corporation of America, they use color-coded plugs—typically red and white/black for stereo audio, and yellow for video.

Uh... Afaik, internet data does not use rca. The yellow is video, the white is left audio, the red is right audio (together, stereo sound).

Two stereo audio (red, white) and one video(yellow). Called rca composite.

The colours one you are thinking about was called YPbPr Component connector and it split the video signal in multiple colour channels for clearer video signal.

No, yellow is video, red and white are audio channels. You might be thinking of component video, but that doesn't include audio in the three cables.

That's not how the audio works on cinch.

Red is the right channel and white is the left channel, so you need both for stereo.

If you use just one you just hear one side.