Lovely pic! ^-^

Wow.

I have not had a tv for almost 3 years 8)

Grandmother had one with handles or what it is called.. such as that

Knobs in my parlance. More properly Dials.

Eh. I used a similar model TV and used the cable box for on/off shutoff until I left Philly in '03, so...

XD Thats one way of getting kids to study XD Imagine if the magazine kept you; a modern day example would by a computer boarderd up XD

At that time I'm not sure how many people were on the internet yet. A lot, sure, but far from most. Not that many kids may have had access.

British TVs all switched to push-buttons when colour took off in the 1970s. When I visited New York in 1981 I was amused to see ads for VCRs with rotary dials (and wood panelling). To me that seeemd like a massive step backwards for what was supposed to be such a high-tech country.

That "sphinx" pose that kids adopt always looks so casual and natural. I can just imagine the kid's mother saying "why don't you use a chair?" and the kid being totally bewildered by the question.

When you only weigh 60 pounds its easy to lie on your gut. Its a wonder kids don't stand on their heads.

Push buttons, eh? Of course, now there are no buttons. If you lost your remote the TV would be about as useful for watching as a cast iron engine block.

I love the retro push-button TV in Ratatouille.

I remember my folks had a colour TV in the late 60's, and one of the earliest remotes. It had four buttons. You pushed them in against some sort of resistence and then something snapped and I almost think you could hear a tiny "Piiiiiing". It didn't change the channels or volume with a light beam like modern remotes. It send an ultrasound signal. I don't have the remote of course, but I do have a drawing I did of it... a few decaces ago.

She'll never learn to steal cable that way!

He looks somewhat Tezuka-ish to me...

It's funny, I remember back in the mid 80's needing a cable box to watch cable, and then they started making TVs regularly that were able to have more than a few set channels, and Cable boxes dissappeared, until the mid 90's when inexplicably, they suddenly came back.

I had a similar set to that one in my room as a kid. I'm slightly amused remembering this, but it was made by Mongomery Ward.

I think what happened is that many TV's have the electronics for a cable attachement built in. The new boxes are probably for digital TV, or perhaps pay-per-view. Whatever it is, I probably can't afford it...

You 'n' me both.

HBO required cable operators to cary their program on weird radio frequencies so television tuners would need help. The idea was to control who could watch. This expanded to a full blown CATV only band plan that reallocated FM broadcast, aironautical mobile, amature radio and public safety radio frequencies to CATV channels. TV makers started using varactor tuned VFOs instead of the big rotary switch to select these channels making the cable tuner superflous. HBO then made cable operators use other methods of "conditional access". Incidentally, the rotary switch didn't just select channels. It usually had fairly good bandpass filters in it that were eliminated when the knob went away. Those filters were sorely missed by many people for many years. Without the bandpass filter for each channel television sets suffered from signal interferrence problems. Then came QAM. Digital cable channels that let cable operators stuff more that one program into each channel. MPEG encoding of aural and visual elementary data streams which were then multiplexed into a multiprogram transport stream with data table added to make separating the programs possible. The digital data can be scrambled or even encrypted to control who can watch.

Then came the Internet which opened a whole other can of worms.

(I am gonna shut up now.)

I remember the "outer dial" or whatever, that you fiddled with if the channel wasn't coming in clear. But those actually disappeared before the channel selector dial. At some point I guess it wasn't thought needed -- maybe some sort of automatic filter had been built in.

Cable? what is this "cable" you speak of? When I had a TV of similar vintage my family got ABC or NBC . . . and maybe PBS when the wind was right. Power rotor control for the antenna on the roof sat on top of the TV though . . . of course, only having a couple of channels is one of the reasons I got so much done in school . . . come to think of it, not having cable is probably one of the reasons I get anything done now . . . proabably why I like this pic so much.

It took until I was an adult to finally do that to my TV. Well, not literally.

Works! But it's a lot easier to just turn the volume knob to the left

Or pull the plug. But that wouldn't make an interesting picture.