Black and white TV

I was thinking today that very early in my childhood, my family owned a black and white TV. I got you all beat!

Yikes!

Edit: And grandma had the Volkswagen beetle!

 

We owned one when I was very young. It was kept in my parent's room. The nice color Zenith was in the family room.

 

As soon as I read this I thought about when my dad threw our Kirby vaccum in our swimming pool.It was so so old.
He pulled that heavy thing out,dried it out,and it still worked.
The gool old days.

 

I still have one in storage...I think it even works. Ha!

 

I had a B&W TV in my bedroom growing up as a kid

I remember what a difference it made watching the TV show V when my parents finally bought me a color TV


Hotwater

 

I'm so happy I didn't have to deal with black and white tv since I was born in 83.

 

Remember when there was actually a good reason to BEAT on the damned television when it messed up? Sometimes a good whack on the side would be just enough of a jar to help a tube make better contact in its socket, or would do much the same for the tuner. And remember how eventually someone would lose the knob to the tuner, and you'd have to use pliars to change channel? And fussing with antennas and foil, and weird postures in the room to "fine tune" the picture? Digital is so much better...

 

My great grandpa designed the first commercial TV set, so there.

 

What about those filter things you'd put over the screen to make it look like color?

.

 

That's too ghetto / too trailer trash to even contemplate


Hotwater

 

I have found that beating on the flat panel works as well..

 

We had one- though I think we always had a color one,as well.
Worse we ONLY had network and a HUGE antenna on the house for the longest time.
..but that's not so much because I am old-it is because we lived in BFE and were poor.
Yanno we called the cable guy out to our dirt road once to get cable and laughed his ass off at us. Can't get cable out there.

 

I think it was the early 80's before my parents got a colour tv. They went all out and got a huge 25" tv. Back in those days that was about as big as they got. It was a floor model, which meant it was one of those ones in a wooden case. It even had a remote control, no more getting up to change channels, or fine tune the channel since it had auto frequency control too. We could then sit on the couch to change between the 3 channels that we got (actually 4 but 1 was french so it doesn't count).

A couple years later I bought myself a tv for my bedroom and it was a 12" black and white with out a remote control. It cost me $99.99 for that one so I wonder what the 25" cost. I did watch the french channel on this one but only on Saturday night to watch my Habs play, and on Friday nights after midnight for the softcore porn movie they always had. I made myself a remote for this one from a broom handle and a couple scraps of wood. To spoiled by that time to get up to change channels.LOL

 

I came with the TV.
My family bought our first 12" Admiral in 1951, a few months after I was born.

I remember when I was small in the early 50s -- THERE WAS NO COLOR TV!
And in most places no more than 2 -3 channels. Only the nations largest cities had more.

And -- THERE WAS NO UHF! [UHF = Ultra High Frequency, all channels above 13]
I don't remember hearing about UHF until about 1964, though it might have been around but not very available.
All TVs came VHF only. [VHF = Very High Frequency, channels 1 - 13]
When our family finally got UHF in 64, we had to buy a separate UHF tuner that sat on top of our VHF TV. Kind of like the new digital converter boxes now. Then we had VHF, and when we switched on the converter and tunned to channel 13, UHF as well. We then had 12 channels instead of 9, it seemed miraculous to me.

And, ALL TV channels signed off the air at 12 midnight. With various films [not videos, or tapes -- films] usually of the U.S. Navy Blue Angles, or Air Force Thunder Birds aerobatic teams [in (new)straight winged Korean War vintage jet fighters] doing majestic maneuvers in a clear blue sky -- or, of various beautiful and/or patriotic locations across the US -- and in some cases, just a close up of an American flag flapping in a stiff breeze -- while the Star Spangled Banner was play by a symphony, or military band.
Then -- there was just snow and static hiss.

Then, at 5AM, they went back on the air. But, they only put up still, technical, test patterns, and an ear piercing, high pitched audio test signal, until 6AM. When, they replayed the same sign off film with the Star Spangled Banner.
And then, they showed 15 minutes of news [yes, 15 minutes of news -- not 30, or and hour, or hours and hours like now]

It wasn't until the very late 60s that I remember a station staying on all night [24 hours]. It was a UHF channel, I think 36 or 20 out of San Jose, CA., and what they showed was old movies from the 30s, 40s, 50s and early 60s. It was called Movies Till Dawn with Jay Brown [a local car dealer who hosted it]. This was in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I also remember that many TV shows were done LIVE -- [not recorded live, like now]. So, there were plenty of televised mistakes -- bloopers as they happened. Now they are all edited out before broad cast.
I remember Steve Allen, the original host of the tonight show, cracking up and laughing like and idiot for about 10 minutes once, while trying to do a solo comedy sketch. [there is a recorded clip of this -- maybe on U tube? it's worth web searching for]

And when color TV did come along, I think it was mid 50s, only a few shows were in color. It wasn't until the late 60s that they stopped producing B&W shows.
They would advertise shows, like The Red Skelton Show, and at the end of spot the announcer would say, "In color!" It was almost like saying, 'Deluxe'!

I also remember that not everyone had a TV. We had family friends that used to come over to our house on certain nights just to watch I love Lucy and The Honeymooners with us. It was like some kind of special event.
And -- it was!

Personally, I miss the wonder and adventure of the early days of TV. It was so fresh, new, and inspiring.
Now it is all so perfect, slick, and polished.
Once viewers were pioneers.
Now we are glassy eyed, boob tube junkies.
The adventure is gone.
It's not a special event [though they still try to convince us all that it is] -- now -- it's just TV.

 

Does anyone remember seeing green on their black and white TV back in the mid-60's? I remember a commercial, maybe for Squirt or Mountain Dew that had flashes of green in it that showed up on B&W TV. Something about the product was so great that it showed up green on B&W TV. Nobody else seems to remember this, but I do, distinctly. I even found a technical explanation for how it was possible, but no specifics of this ad.

 

Yes, I do remember that commercial because we still had a B&W TV.
I haven't thought about that since they quit showing it -- what a neat flashback!
I seem to remember that it was 7 Up. But, I won't swear to that for sure. But, I'll bet that it was.
I remember seeing the bubbles rising in the wet, open, back-lit, GREEN bottle -- against the B&W background -- in a close up at the end of the spot.
But, I'm green-red color blind, and always thought it was really in B&W and my color vision was just tricking me. Cause no one ever said anything about it being green, and I never said that it looked that way to me. I got kidded enough about not seeing colors exactly right.
Nice to know after all this time that in this case I actually had it right! HAH!

 

Clever how engineers were able to cram the color information on what was already a limited bandwidth and keep both systems compatible with one another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_television

.

 

Hey you mugs, check out this link about seeing color with only black and white. Experiment with the disk!

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/col_benham/index.html

Back in the days before PCs and video games, kids would play with mechanical toys. One was a spinning disk known as a Benham disk which could 'produce' color using black and white strips. In the link above, I can see yellow, brown, and green at various speeds.

One could also put such a pattern on a toy top and perceive colors as the top went through various rpm. Hip, man.

.

 

Hey, this is the first time I found anyone else who remembers that commercial! I didn't imagine it!

 

when color t.v. first started being done .the shows all advertised themselves "in living color"it was a very big deal and rightfully so.i think the color sets were pretty expensive at first.a tough decision whether or not families could afford one.