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Are you too young to remember these? (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 weeks ago by to c/lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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[–] 124 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

I'm "turn to channel 3" old...

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  • [–] 15 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    It's been about 20 years since I watched cable/broadcast TV in my home. But yeah way back tvs didn't have inputs for other devices, instead you had a box which you put in between the antenna or cable signal and your device which basically over wrote channel 3(why channel 3? I have no idea) with whatever your device was out putting. So if you wanted to play Nintendo you would change to channel 3 and see Mario or metroid.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    It's been a while since I've had to do a game system setup on an old TV, (like damn near 20 years) but I think you used channel 3 because it was a channel reserved for local communications, so there would never be "TV" on that channel. Your VCR connected to the TV with a coax cable, and if you wanted to have "TV" plugged in at the same time, you either needed a TV with multiple coax inputs (I think it was common to have 2, one for VCR, and one for satellite/aerial antenna) or a coax splitter. Early on, those RCA plugs weren't built into a lot of TVs, so you needed the VCR to inject that signal onto coax for the TV. Lots (if not most/all) VCRs would let you switch the channel used in the settings, I think mainly to cover other regions where channel 3 was not standardized.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    I remember the coax cable but did not know about channel 3 being local communication. I thought it was just convention.

    Thanks for teaching me.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago

    I could be wrong, but I think that was what the convention was in the US at least.

    Similar to how there is nothing "stopping" a web server from having a 192.168.x.x address, but we have a standard that blocks off those addresses to be used inside of your own network.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    It's not the case. We had WISC-TV, the CBS affiliate, on channel 3 in our area. I seem to recall that one could switch between channel 2 and channel 3 on the Atari RF modulators, and later, VCRs could switch between channel 3 and channel 4. I think they used 2 and 3 because those were the first two channels, and the FCC wouldn't allow two adjacent channels in the same area, so one of the two would always be unused for everybody. (Oddly, there was no TV channel 1.)

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 1 point 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Was there a station that broadcast on channel 3? I remember TVs growing up often (always?) having support for both channels 3 and 4 as auxiliary inputs. Also, what happened to channels 1 and 2?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Channel 2 is KDKA CBS in Pittsburgh.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 child)

    Ah, ok. I’m misremembering. It’s only channel one that didn’t exist. Just looked it up and apparently the FCC reallocated it in 1948 because it was causing interference with another use.

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