You kids today have it made...

Carl Lawrence said:

Although I'm younger than some of you, and I can still remember when I was a little boy at the TV only had 4 channels and no remote, no VCR. The channels were: BBC1, BBC2, ITV1 (it had a different name back then) and Channel 4.

I remember on my trip to London in Autumn of 1990, there were not that many channels compared to what we had here in California.

There was one thing that I had never seen before and that was 95% nudity. Still don't think I've seen that here but the language here----WOW!

When I was a kid, we only got 2 channels (NBC & ABC) on the TV (B&W, no color) with rabbit ears. My dad bought an antenna with a 20 ft mast and rotor and installed it. After that we still got the same 2 channels but they came in clearer. Later we got cable TV and got about a dozen channels but still only a B&W TV. I didn't watch TV in color until I bought my own color TV at the age of 24.

The tone of the discussion reminds me of this

I can remember the milk man and I still see the milk floats sometimes. A milk float is one of these (see below) and there is more info here: Milk float - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My Dad was the local Rag and Bone man with a horse and cart when I was growing up in Nottingham.

OvenMaster said:

As someone who grew up with three channels of black and white television, vacuum tubes, 78rpm records, and a wood-fired potbelly stove in the kitchen, that post was a blast from the past. Well done.

When I was a teenager in the 60's, I remember our TV went out several times. They had at the local convenience stores, a TV Tube Tester. My Dad would look in the back of the TV and try to find a tube that was black like it might have burnt out. He would take several tubes down to the store and test them. He usually didn't find one that was bad. Then the fun came when he would get home and try to remember where the tubes went in the TV.

I recall some different things.
We had the insurance man come to the house weekly to collect a few cents toward life policies. The local doctor always made house-calls, day or night. The Charles Chip man, brought a large metal container full of fresh chips.
When our b/w tv broke and dad could not fix it, he would have the tv man come to the house and fix it for a $ or 2.

bigmck said:

OvenMaster said:

As someone who grew up with three channels of black and white television, vacuum tubes, 78rpm records, and a wood-fired potbelly stove in the kitchen, that post was a blast from the past. Well done.

When I was a teenager in the 60's, I remember our TV went out several times. They had at the local convenience stores, a TV Tube Tester. My Dad would look in the back of the TV and try to find a tube that was black like it might have burnt out. He would take several tubes down to the store and test them. He usually didn't find one that was bad. Then the fun came when he would get home and try to remember where the tubes went in the TV.

Generally, there was a diagram glued to the inside of the cover that showed where each tube went so that wasn't a problem.

bigmck said:

OvenMaster said:

As someone who grew up with three channels of black and white television, vacuum tubes, 78rpm records, and a wood-fired potbelly stove in the kitchen, that post was a blast from the past. Well done.

When I was a teenager in the 60's, I remember our TV went out several times. They had at the local convenience stores, a TV Tube Tester. My Dad would look in the back of the TV and try to find a tube that was black like it might have burnt out. He would take several tubes down to the store and test them. He usually didn't find one that was bad. Then the fun came when he would get home and try to remember where the tubes went in the TV.

My brothers and I would volunteer to go with our Dad when he took the tubes to check at Thrifty's. And what do you know, hey Dad, triple ice cream cones are 15 cents

A Guy