Remember when TV would sign off the air

Do you remember when tv didnt stay on all nite. I think it was around midnight not sure of the time, the stations would sign off the air, and they would announce the station was signing off then play a song, and then fuzzzzzzz, it was off,,, and it wasnt on again till the morning.

 

yes i do..

i remember when ted turner started WTBS, in atlanta,, was a uhf channel so we got it all the way out at the farm..

i remember that afro comedian,, the one that did the dorritos commercials,, back thenn when WTBS first went 24 hours,, he used to do a fucked up commercial for it..

shit man,, that had to have been like 75??

 

alot of stations on basic cable in canada still do this.... its annoying!

 

yes I do, with a flag and a closing song.

Yup, I be old enough to remember.

 

The local PBS channel is the only one that signs off here. FOX used to sign off at 2am, but they stopped that in the mid-90's.

 

i remember if i got up early enough in the morning, like my dad sometimes liked to, if i turned on the tv, like before about 05:30 or 06:00 or so, there'd either be 'snow' or 'test patterns'.

i remember there'd be test paterns after the last show for maybe a half hour or so also.

yes i do remember those days. the only things that came on early early were like captain kangaroo and captain sacto.

then they started having late late shows, but even those didn't run all night. there were usualy several hours of nothing, the hours the infomercials are on now.

prime time was mostly 'westerns' and singers and musicians. after the evening news.
before the news was mostly 'as the stomic turns' and 'all my brats' and whatever the other big time soap was.

n.e.t. was really cool when it first started up before it became p.b.s. (p.b.s. was cool too when n.e.t. was converted to during watergate) anyway n.e.t. was the begining of college classess being offered that way. i remember, you know not actualy enrolling in them, but i loved the lectures and visuals most of them, and there was one thing of that i did and fallowed. there was this class on japanese brush painting it was called then, the two bamboo brushes and the stone 'well' and the inkstick. anyway my parents got me the kit that went with the class, you know the items just mentioned. and i watched it and practiced from the lessons and learned to make the diffferent strokes that would make different kinds of marks and to make paintings with it that way.

i think my mom may still have one i did like that at that time.

=^^=
.../\...

 

They don't still do that? Hmmm, when I was up during the wee hours of the morning feeding my infant twins three years ago, I know that one of the stations I'd flip on would sign off for several hours.

But, then again, that was three years ago, they might not do that at the present. No way am I up at those hours of the morning anymore!

 

I used the just to a while longer to watch the little white dot say goodnight



That probably never happen in the States I guess..

 

well back in the 50s when i was a little guy growing up, when i was talking about , they still did. the u.s. is the only place i've ever lived.

yes i suppose there may be a few uhf stations that still do, but back then there were hardly any uhf stations, just maybe in each market area three comercial stations. one for each of the three then major networks; nbc, cbs and abc.

and one n.e.t. that later became p.b.s. station.

these were all vhf, i.e. channel numbers less then 14!

most places were lucky to be able to get all four and not just one or two like was often with us up in the hills on top of donner summit.

so in those days it was ALL the stations that signed off, not just the exceptions. then there were the first few that stayed on most of the night, with crapy old movies to fill the wee small hours.

i think there may even have been and f.c.c. reg requiring a station to not be on all the time or at least run just a test pattern a certain numbers of hours a day or week or something like that. this was how tecnicians used to repair and align tv's in those days. when everything was vacume tubes and the very kind of digital logic circutry we use in computers now wasn't really practical to exist yet.

yes the transister had been invented and the concept of the integrated circuit existed as a concept in theory, but lsi chips or even msi chips or even logic chips at all were still decades away from being mass produced.

there were no HOME computers then, or game boys, or pocket calculators. the only computers were monsters with vacume tubes and releys and something called core. little magnetic doughnuts that each stored one bit, woven into a kind of screen door looking netting.

personal calculators consisted of odd little tin mechanical objects, adding machines the size of our whole computers now, also all mechanical or electro-mechanical, and slide rules. engineering students actualy used to carry and use these things called slide rules. they were even kind of the universal symbol of higher mathimatics.

you know, this is like when my parents used to tell my about there still being horse drawen dilevery wagons in the city when they were kids.

kind of hard for me to immagine then as i'm sure it must be for most of you now.

do i miss those years the way parents and grand parents said they did then?

mostly no. the railroads running trains, and cities having trolleys and not having to worry about building codes if you lived far enough out in the boonies, those are the only things i miss about it. otherwise no. culturaly it was a lot of the same crap as now. some of it worse.

i would have liked for there to have still been narrow gauges and interurbans still running where i was when i was growing up and then for there to already be computers and the internet in highschool, but these two things were decades apart and the gap inbetween them is when i was growing up and when the hippie era was when i was a teenager, as we were called in those days, not children, but young adults, not having the same authority as adults but expected to behave mostly like them, or how they pretended to.

well at least adults were expected to pretend like they weren't drunken louts even if they were. that was something.

argh, ramble ramble, but anyway tv stations loggin off, that for me is in the context of that much earlier era, not other then exceptions in the since cable and watergate now.

=^^=
.../\...

 

Whenever the BBC TV channels used to sign off for the night they would play the national anthem: 'God Save The Queen'.Believe you,me that in some households- viewers would stand to attention,politely wait for the national anthem to end then switch off the t.v. set.

 

Yeah, I remember it. I was pretty little when they did away with it in my area though.

 

I think maybe i have a slight memory of this happening, possibley when I was real young.

 

And goodnight

 

I wish this still happened. My step mother watches crime dramas late at night and the tv's above my bedroom.

 

i remember that
i also remeber when i was a little kid i used to get up at like 4 in the morning when pbs would come back on and i'd watch this yoga show with a woman in a blue leotard do yoga, i was like 3/4, and i'd always watch her do yoga every morning

 

I remember the local channels in my area signing off for the night, and I remember sometimes being up early enough to catch our national anthem, complete with scenic pictures. Of course, the following shows would suck; news, boring sitcom...

 

Anyone remember, 'Technical Difficulties. Please Stand By'.

If stations signed off in today's post 911 era, I'm sure the song in the U.S. would be 'God Bless America.'

.

 

Hey i remember that yoga lady!!

 

I think that was Lilia's yoga.

.

 

Lilias, yoga, and you, hehehe - that was the name of the program - so hip for some hip times!

yes, i do recall the signoff at the end of the night, national anthem and all......also, where i lived, we got to hear: "it's ten o'clock - do you know where your children are?"

ah, such memories!