Community Chat

[Mz iMac]

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@on the bay wrote:

I do remember watching our black and white tv, though our mother was careful about what we watched.

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@on the bay 

What shows was your mother shielding you from during the b/w tv era? 

[Mom2Dogs]

I thought a remote for the TV was ridiculous....!!

What was the big deal about getting up to change the channel.!

[on the bay]

@Mz iMac,

I just remember there was a show that we were watching and it was really scary, something we normally wouldn't be watching and she said we couldn't watch it. I was only 5 but remember that. I was kind of glad because it was pretty scary but was also curious. And we also had an early bedtime so this was probably an unusual time for us to be up.

[Carmie]

When I was born in 1954, my family already had TV and phone.

I remember my first Computer.  I bought it at Montgomery Ward on January 18, 1992. It was made by IBM. I had no idea how to use one, but I figured

it out.  This was before Windows and it used DOS.  I ran a cord to the phone line and dialed up internet service on Prodigy, which was bought out by AOL.

After that, whenever anyone called me, they got a busy signal...all day and all night.  I was addicted!

[J Town Girl]

We never had a roof antenna for our TV only the old rabbit ears on top of the television.

We never could get more than one channel.  I remember when we first had cable  installed.  It was so wonderful to get three or four channels.  The morning after  the installation I wanted to stay home from school so I could watch all of the daytime TV shows that we could never get until then.  

I told my mother that I felt sick and couldn't go to school.  I'm sure she didn't believe me but agreed that I could stay home as long as I didn't go outside and I had to lay on the couch.  That was fine with me.  I picked out all of the shows I wanted to see from the TV Guide and had the best day of my life.  It was short-lived though because the next day I had to go back to school.

When I see all of the channels now available for viewing I remember back to those days of one channel TV and laugh about how we somehow managed as a family of four to just be happy to watch whatever was on at the time.  

[Lucky Charm]

My dad built our first color tv using a Heathkit in the mid 1960's. 

The second one he built for my great grandmother next door.

He offered to build my grandmother one, but she declined.  lol

They were beautiful televisions in wooden cabinets the picture was as clear as any you could buy in a store.  He eventually built a channel changer, too.  It was clunky and the dial on the tv actually moved around in a circle.

He also built a whole house hi fi system using the same Heathkit.  

My dad never got into watching sports as he was always busy doing things he liked to do and still does to this day.

Once out riding his bike about 25 years ago, he passed a house and a man was working on an airplane in his back yard.  My dad stopped and they got talking, the man was trying to fix his plane and said he wished he could ditch the job and just build a brand new plane.  With the help of my dad, he did.  

He knows more about computers than I do, but I remember he had a big old clunky desktop up until about 10 years ago.  When it was giving him trouble, he wacked it on the side real hard.  Said it stopped acting up after that.

[ninjawife]

In the mid seventies we got Pong, the first home video game.  It was cool at first but old fast.  A few years later we got an Atari which was much cooler. 

[Xivambala]

We had TV's and a phone when I was a small child in the 50's. The items that stand out to me were the hand held calculator in the early 70's  which was very expensive and I believe was from Texas Instruments. Next was the early mobile phones. My mother had one for her job as a computer programmer/sytems analyst sometime in the early 80's. It was a huge monster compared to today's smart phones.

[tototwo]

Yesterday my husband found an old business card in some of his papers.  The phone number on the card was only 5 numbers.  We got to talking about when 5-digit phone numbers added a district name - instead of a phone number being 22222, it was now "Central 22222" or Ce22222."  Then they ditched the district name for numbers and we had to learn 7-digit phone numbers such as 232-2222.  Later, they added area codes - three more numbers to learn!  

I remember having to dial "O" for an operator to make a long distance call.  When they added area codes with a "1" in front of it, we could dial our own long distance calls. Wow!

My first full time job when I was a teenager was Switchboard Operator - using cords to connect calls on a large board.  Think Lily Tomlin's character "one ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingy..."

[CJC]

My grandparents had a candlestick style phone in their home back when I was small. Then they graduated to a standard black dial phone with a party line. What fun I had with that party line when I was young...so naughty!  I remember our first small B&W tv console back in early 1950's. 3 local channels that began broadcasting programs about 4 PM and signed off air about 9PM. This was in Cleveland OH. My favorite show on Friday evenings was "I Remember Mama".  Manual typewriters only; electric typewriters not around yet. Radios were tabletop, though I do remember my great aunt having a big old console radio. Transistor radios were still in the future. I received a GE clock radio while in high school and thought it was amazing....an alarm click and radio in one. 

Our family home had one of the first dishwashers in our kitchen when we moved in in 1955. Also had one of the first garbage disposals. The previous owners of that house must have been very progressive. 

All wonderful memories of a time long gone. BTW, I never had my own car until I graduated college and had a job. Young people today amaze me with the lifestyle they think they're entitled to.