Canadian family parties like it's 1986, technology-wise

[Starman]

USA Network had some fairly major sports shows and were the nearest thing to music television until MTV came on in 1981.

 

[fossywriter8]

Our cable "remote" was about 3 inches by 10 inches and was wired directly into the TV. It had a grid of numbers and a selector switch. To pick a channel, you toggled the switch to the row and pushed the button under the number to get that channel. There was also a dial you could use to fine tune the channel. Occasionally, you could fine tune it enough to get a fuzzy view of a pay channel.
Nickelodeon was once a pay channel.
MTV came out, providing the the perfect combination of radio and TV with videos with VJ's. How radical. For something that was supposed to be so bad, a lot of "good" people sure made sure they watched a lot of it.
Until we bought our own, we had to rent a VCR player when we rented a VCR tape. Movie night was big deal and usually meant something special — pizza!!!
We thought it was great when we got our second TV because we could watch what we wanted in the basement while our parents watched something in the living room.
WGN, WOR and TBS were the closest things us non-pay channel cable subscribers had to movie choices, other than VCR tape rentals.
ESPN was an oasis in a sports coverage desert.
Although some people had cordless phones, we made do with a wall unit (yes, one phone). Privacy depended on how far you stretched the cord, and it was never far enough.
A Walkman was the best accessory a kid could have.
It was cool to own or ride a moped.
Teen girls nearly hairsprayed the ozone layer into oblivion, but we managed to Save the Whales, provide Farm Aid and Live Aid, and musically proclaim that We Are The World.
We took the Pepsi Challenge, and went Back to the Future.
New Coke reared its ugly head and quickly went away.

 

[Armchair_QB]

What cable channels were worth watching before ESPN came along?

CNN and ESPN both started within months of each other in 1979. Prior to that, having cable usually meant getting a couple of out-of-town stations (WTBS, WGN, WOR, etc.) and a station that had the weather forecast 24/7. Maybe also getting a station from a nearby metro area that the antenna didn't pull in very well. But there weren't many (any?) designated cable networks in those days.

HBO was available in the late 70s. The Jessica Lange/Jeff Bridges version of King Kong and Inside The NF are the first things I remember watching on cable - at a friend's house. Must have been 1977. USA was around back then too.

We didn't get cable until 78 or 79 and we had one of the cable boxes fossy described.

 

[old_tony]

USA Network had some fairly major sports shows and were the nearest thing to music television until MTV came on in 1981.

USA was actually the first cable network to have major league baseball, no? Thursday Night game of the week.

Edit: Not counting Braves on TBS, Cubs on WGN and Mets on WOR.

 

[old_tony]

Our cable "remote" was about 3 inches by 10 inches and was wired directly into the TV. It had a grid of numbers and a selector switch. To pick a channel, you toggled the switch to the row and pushed the button under the number to get that channel. There was also a dial you could use to fine tune the channel. Occasionally, you could fine tune it enough to get a fuzzy view of a pay channel.
Nickelodeon was once a pay channel.
MTV came out, providing the the perfect combination of radio and TV with videos with VJ's. How radical. For something that was supposed to be so bad, a lot of "good" people sure made sure they watched a lot of it.
Until we bought our own, we had to rent a VCR player when we rented a VCR tape. Movie night was big deal and usually meant something special — pizza!!!
We thought it was great when we got our second TV because we could watch what we wanted in the basement while our parents watched something in the living room.
WGN, WOR and TBS were the closest things us non-pay channel cable subscribers had to movie choices, other than VCR tape rentals.
ESPN was an oasis in a sports coverage desert.
Although some people had cordless phones, we made do with a wall unit (yes, one phone). Privacy depended on how far you stretched the cord, and it was never far enough.
A Walkman was the best accessory a kid could have.
It was cool to own or ride a moped.
Teen girls nearly hairsprayed the ozone layer into oblivion, but we managed to Save the Whales, provide Farm Aid and Live Aid, and musically proclaim that We Are The World.
We took the Pepsi Challenge, and went Back to the Future.
New Coke reared its ugly head and quickly went away.

I remember in the 1980s it was a big deal to buy a TV that was "cable-ready," so you didn't have to rent the box from the cable company.

 

[cjericho]

Love how the guy wants to live likes it's 1986 but he is wearing one of the new-style Jays jerseys.

But that sweet mullet never went out of style.

 

[Mark2010]

Our family first got cable in 1982 and I remember USA, ESPN and CNN. Before that, we'd see it occasionally at relatives' houses.

Back in those days, a lot of sports were syndicated and ESPN would show taped replays. I don't know if that was a rights issues or a technology issue. But they certainly didn't have 1000 announcers and 1000 production crews. Also, back then the NCAA managed rights for college football and there were generally no more than 3 live games on Saturday if you had a local team that had a deal. (CBS had jumped in the game in 1982 and split a schedule with ABC, but were not allowed to go head-to-head except for a couple of dates.) After the Supreme Court deregulated broadcasts in 1984, they started airing live games.

ESPN first got the NBA in 1983 (split package with USA). That and the USFL were their first major right deals. Lot of college basketball, but a fair amount (including the NCAA tournament) was picked up from other companies who produced the games. The 1987 NFL deal was the first time the NFL was shown on cable.

I do remember them showing golf as early as 1983 and tennis in 1986.

 

[Oscar Gamble]

If This guy was sincere in re-creating life as it was in 1986, in the video he'd be wearing a George Bell #11 Blue Jays' jersey instead of a modern #19 Jose Bautista one.

 

[Corky Ramirez up on 94th St.]

We didn't get cable in our rural Eastern Connecticut town until 1994 or thereabouts. In fact, our postal address for the longest time was just RFD No. 1, just like our neighbors'. As a matter of fact, I think if you still use that address, my parents will get their mail.

For whatever reason we couldn't get Ch. 38 via our big antenna on the roof — we lived on a hill — but we could get Ch. 11 out of New York and Ch. 17 out of Philadelphia just fine. Pissed me off as a Red Sox fan, but Steve Balboni quickly became my favorite player as a 12-year-old. But yeah, I still can remember turning the rotor to turn the antenna and hearing it go "ka-chunk ka-chunk" all the way to southeast or whatever. Oddly enough, the antenna still is on the roof, and before my father switched to Dish, he could get HD channels on it.

 

[Sea Bass]

If This guy was sincere in re-creating life as it was in 1986, in the video he'd be wearing a George Bell #11 Blue Jays' jersey instead of a modern #19 Jose Bautista one.

Actually, he'd have burned his powder blue #7 Damaso Garcia jersey.

 

[Batman]

1986? Pussies.

 

[Football_Bat]

I remember when our neighborhood was finally strung for cable in 1980 and thinking we were slumming because we only got Showtime while my aunt in the next town got HBO.

But 1986? Geez, even compact disks were out by then.

 

[Songbird]

Just wait till Mookie's up ...

 

[Mark2010]

If This guy was sincere in re-creating life as it was in 1986, in the video he'd be wearing a George Bell #11 Blue Jays' jersey instead of a modern #19 Jose Bautista one.

Actually, he'd have burned his powder blue #7 Damaso Garcia jersey.

Dave Stieb.

 

[Mr. Costello]

I honestly didn't know CNHI had a Canada branch.

 

[apeman33]

I'm approximating the lineup a bit, but this was cable TV in Garden City, Kansas, in about 1982.
2 - KWGN out of Denver. Wichita didn't have any independent stations, so the company pulled this station in.
3 - The weather channel, which was a black-and-white camera which was on a motoroized tripod that went back and forth along a wall with a series of analog dials. Time, temperature, humidity, wind speed and wind direction. Maybe the barometer too.
4 - The CBS station. It was channel 6 over the air.
5 - Wasn't anything for the longest time I can remember. When HBO came here, they put it on this channel.
6 - The old-style UPI news ticker. Blocky computerized text going up the screen.
7 - A public television station from Denver. Wichita had one, but it didn't have translators in western Kansas like the network channels did.
8 - Allotted to the high school.
9 - I don't remember what it was originally. The weather dials moved here after WTBS became a permanent channel on 3.
10 - The NBC station, 11 over the air.
11 - nothing, usually a ghost signal of the NBC station
12 - The ABC station, 13 over the air.
13 - nothing, another ghost signal.

And it stayed pretty much that way until USA Network was added. They put that on 6. Then late night, it popped over and became WGN. Channel 7 popped over after the public station's sign-off and was WTBS until about 7 a.m.

The channel with the tripod and weather dials would get wonky sometimes. The tripod would get knocked out of whack occasionally and rotate too far in one direction or the other. You'd end up not seeing all the dials on one side and a shot of a bare wall on the other.

MTV and ESPN didn't arrive until 1986 or 87.

 

[Double J]

Nice to know the Leafs will still suck, though. Some things never change.

Hey, we made it to Game 7 of the Norris final this year! And we'll always make the playoffs as long as Detroit's in the same division.

Man, the Dead Things sure do suck. The Leafs will undoubtedly win their next Cup way before Detroit does. ;D

 

[Mark2010]

Wasn't 1986 the year Montreal won and Patrick Roy was a rookie?

 

[BTExpress]

3 - The weather channel, which was a black-and-white camera which was on a motoroized tripod that went back and forth along a wall with a series of analog dials. Time, temperature, humidity, wind speed and wind direction. Maybe the barometer too.

I loved that channel as a kid (always had a thing for analog gauges; never owned a bike without a speedometer). Older brothers laughed at me for watching that channel.

But I remember that channel from the early 70s. By 1982 we were up to around 40 cable channels in East Tennessee.

 

[Starman]

Bottom line this is just a variation on those annoying sanctimonious cliched "Family decides to give up TV" stories that began running in NEWSPAPERS about 1950 and really only faded out in the 1990s.

Of course there's a lot of mind-numbing **** on teevee, but it always amused me to see newspapers constantly giving big play to stories which implied deciding to go without it was some big moral accomplishment.

There's plenty of mind-numbing **** in newspapers, too. Just once I would have laughed to see a teevee station do a story of a family deciding to cancel all its newspaper subscriptions, show them trucking up bundles of old papers out the door, etc etc., and go on and on about all the exciting interesting things they can do now they aren't wasting time reading newspapers.