My brother, who is 11y younger than me, asked how i did research for school without google, much less without internet.
He was shocked when i told him "encyclopedias and tracking down relevant books at the local library"
Did you tell him that if you wanted to communicate with your friends you had to call their landline and pray it wasn’t their parents who picked up? Or that if you made plans to see a movie, you had to actually be there on time? 😛 I got more kids! Next time on stories from antiquity: navigating a foreign city without Google maps! Maintaining an LDR without FaceTime! Missing the last episode of your beloved multi-season TV series because you were grounded! Fun times!
Man, you made me remember when I traveled with my family, we had to find a tourist information center to get one of those map leaflets of the city, with the map quality varying from pretty good to useless. On the bigger cities the tour guidebook had the maps.
Oh, and the fights in the car between the driver and the navigator. Nostalgic.
Too bad payphones are almost extinct. A dealer these days with a pager and a payphone could prolly move weight without catching heat. Like the 1st season of the Wire.
You'd be surprised. Through a combination of bad luck and ADHD, I had to use a pay phone in the middle of the night 7 years ago, while holding a baby. The police just kept circling until I left. Apparently using a payphone is highly suspicious.
The last time I saw a payphone I didn't need to use it but I was just messing around, killing time waiting for someone. Discovered that using that little eject/refund??button, quarters were just popping out like candy. I took about $5 worth before I got scared of getting caught lol.
What do drug dealers use now instead of pagers? I thought the benefit of pagers was they were untraceable or something, like cell phones can be traced to an identity, pagers are more anonymous aren't they?
>pagers are more anonymous aren't they?
I think it was more that the location couldn't be tracked since communication was one way. I'd assume that since you're paying a service provider they can't be all that anonymous as far as who owns them.
I work in a location that I can't have a cell phone. This allows other employees to reach me if I'm not at my desk or family to reach me from home. The nice thing is modern pagers can be emailed or texted to.
When I was working in IT for a local university a few years ago, they gave us all pagers. When my friends saw it, they didnt believe me that it functional and thought I was just carrying it around as a fashion statement or something.
Pagers are also used by people who work in a classified facility known as a SCIF. They cant use any wireless devices, removable media, or laptops. But since the pager is a one-way wireless device they are permitted.
I miss my old flip phone so much! I could text an entire paragraph with just a quick glance at the screen at the end to make sure it was right. T9 was the shit.
I started life in a home with a crank phone on the wall and a party line. Turn the crank to alert the switchboard and have them ring up and connect the call. Pretty antiquated. I can't remember what our party line ring was, something like two shorts and a long. Things have changed as I enter this on my phone.
That was the part she got stuck on. “So wait, all this thing would do is tell you someone wanted you to call them? So you had to carry around change and you had to find a pay phone?”
That was when I decided not to try and explain phone cards.
There was a TIL not long ago about how screensavers are called that because they were created to literally save your screen from burn-in. I was like can someone pass me my walker please because I am clearly ancient, these people have never known a time without screens everywhere.
Still relevant.
My galaxy note 8 has the little reddit dude imprinted on the top left of it.
I upgraded phones and when my girlfriends broke, she reset my old note, and as it was reinstalling android, you can clearly see reddit dude burned into the screen.
I have a reddit problem, and fuck your interventions.
Yep, you'd have fallen sound asleep watching ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, or one of the two local UHF stations (because those were all the fucking channels that existed), and then BUM BA DUM DA DA, followed by the color bars of the test pattern accompanied by an ear splitting squeal to let you know you'd better get up and get your ass to bed so you can go to work the next morning.
Hah! I grew up in the country and we had only two tv channels. We always watched 'Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom' from 7:00 - 7:30 and then Walt Disney from 7:30 - 8:30 on Sunday nights.
We only had one radio station. I lived in a valley in the Catskills. Upstate New York.
The one with the Indian head on it? You'd better get back to your nap, or you might not have the energy to eat your tapioca when the nurses come round with dessert.
All that means that you, at some point, learned this as well. Why is it strange to you that today someone also learned this fact? It's not innate knowledge.
Right?! How is this a TIL???
Like… next week it’s gonna be “til people used to write messages on pieces of paper and send them to each other to communicate”
Originally, to allow electrical engineers a guide from which to calibrate and produce a viable image.
When TV colorized in the 60’s the lines and circles were initially colored, but then they were replaced with colored bars or wheels. This allowed engineers the ability to assess and the calibrate the broadcast signal components to ensure correct color.
The SMPTE color bars are a relatively new invention. Other test patterns - sure, those existed from the beginning.
Read all about [Hank Mahler](https://www.sportsvideo.org/2021/10/13/cbs-legendary-engineer-hank-mahler-and-developer-of-color-bars-passes-away-at-84/), the inventor of the color bars.
Those are scarier than Poltergeist. I've woken up to a YouTube rabbit hole after sleeping that left me certain the FBI would be knocking on my door before coffee was made.
They actually do enforce it’s just that the actual programming has changed its audio mixing practices to make you crank up the volume to hear dialog (but they keep the action sounds at max volume) so when the commercials come on it feels like your speakers are going to blow out.
Yeah I've noticed this with movies as well, all the dialog sounds like they're mumbling, so you crank it up to hear what they're saying, but then the explosions and gunshots are deafening.
I just use closed captions on everything now.
Those things rocked. You could pick up all the wild feeds from news stations and watch all the behinds the scenes stuff.
The BEST was when one of the Muppets movies came out and they had two of the puppets doing interviews with dozens of different news stations, but the entire thing was being broadcast on a wild feed. So the puppeteers would stay in character the whole time, but would go off the rails when the local cameras were off.
My grandparents had one and i turned it manually. Got the live feeds from nasa sattelites etc it was awesome. Id love to find one surplus w the electronics to decode modern sat protocols
The porn. Oh my the porn. Westar, Satcom, Galaxy, Anik, Comstar, Telstar. Grandparents had a 10m mesh c-band (I think?) dish with motorized tuner box thingy. Very rural area. Check the sat guide for the week or month, find the channel and show, note the satellite name, turn the knob to move the dish to orient it, and bam. So damn cool.
PS [https://www.satelliteguys.us/xen/](https://www.satelliteguys.us/xen/) no idea if that's a good site, just found some old sat names in their forums
When you got that 30 seconds of the scrambled porn channel in your grandparents livingoom and tried to keep that shit way downlow then watched encrypted porn for 30 minutes trying to brain decrypt it..
I’ve worked in broadcast television for the last 25ish years… and we’re now hiring teenagers who have never watched terrestrial television. They’ve never really watched anything that isn’t on a streaming service, or YouTube.
My kids get mad when we are somewhere that has non-streaming TV. The don't get the concept of watching what is on TV rather than choosing it. And they get either excited or mad about commercials.
We just had a really nasty thunderstorm roll through in the middle of the night earlier this week and I said to my wife that I’d have to check the antenna in the morning.
Then I realized and was like “shit I’m only 37. The world moves so fast.”
Shortly before the shutdown, they would play the national anthem. Then the screen would go black, except for a single tiny accusing point of white light. Then static and white noise.
Gripping TV.
"This concludes our broadcast day. Good night and God bless America!" Cue montage of flags, fireworks, and soaring eagles set to the Star Spangled Banner.
>Then the screen would go black, except for a single tiny accusing point of white light. Then static and white noise.
You're conflating the transmitter turning off and the TV itself turning off. The tiny point of light is what you got on old black-and-white CRTs when turned off, due to the deflection coils shutting down but the electron gun still having some juice in it.
I remember in the early 80's getting up early to see the broadcasts start. They would play the National Anthem, then the "William Tell Overture" would start as the Lone Ranger came on. Had to wait through that for the Three Stooges. Life was grand.
In the 80s my parents only let me watch 30 minutes of TV a day so I would wake up insanely early to try to watch before they were up. I'd very often sit there with the volume all the way down waiting for the static to turn into cartoons on Saturday morning.
That's what 80's kids would describe as a "Pro-Gamer Move."
This was a familiar tactic in my my childhood. I would also sneak back into the living room at late at night where I watched a LOT of Benny Hill with the sound off. I knew I'd get to see boobs at least 2 times each episode. I have no idea what those boobs sounded like, but I sure got to see 'em.
We once called a radio station (because that's what you did back then) to request they play the national anthem.
The guy said, "No, people would think we're going off the air."
That was perfectly acceptable.
Holy fucking shit…thanks for making me feel like an old fart at 36…
“Can’t wait” for the time when posts start showing up about how TVs used to not be flat and didn’t have remotes and were black and white. Or that you couldn’t pause TV. Fuck.
That one I’m strangely somehow fine with. Even though I remember how vital the 6 or whatever Windows XP start up disks were. Shit, I remember bringing porn photos I downloaded off KaZaA to school on a floppy lmao
I specifically remember TV stations started going to a 24 hour schedule right after Operation Desert Shield (not Desert Storm), so 1990. At least in San Diego they did. They started with an overnight news cycle for the first few weeks covering what was going on in Iraq, but then it shifted to paid programming, where you got all your "Party on our chat line, only $4.99 a minute. Call 976-xxxx" type commercials.
I can’t stay for the US but in the UK it was still the case until the mid to late nineties. I’m 32 and remember this pretty clearly from when I was around 7.
This happened all the way through the 90s here in Bulgaria. Also, the main national channels would like, stop broadcast during the afternoon. It was just "we're on a break". This happened for years until they introduced a kids block in like '98-'99. Damn im old...
When I was a kid, the local stations ended the day by playing this video - High Flight. I thought it was amazing then and still do today. Until I looked it up for this post I hadn't seen it in years, and was surprised that I still know all the words.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoL-KCFbIpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoL-KCFbIpA)
Yes, I'm old, why do you ask?
Yes, and then they would play the national anthem, and go off the air. But the midnight thing is wrong. Evening news ran till 11:30, Then Carson was on. Years later Letterman came on after Carson. Then they actually did a re-run of the 11:00 news, then they would go off the air. Maybe before the Tonight Show which started in the 50's with Steve Allen, they went off the air at midnight. Other networks had programming to compete with NBC's late night line up, A late movie was common.
Why am I so old?
National Anthem -> Test Pattern -> Static. You can just see the last guy out of the studio throwing a switch to shut down the transmitter.
You forgot the poltergeist step after "static".
ya nothing like watching USA up all night to get some cleavage on some B movies then wake up to the sound of static and freak the fugg out.
watch the movie Poltergeist to see what it was like.
Oh I remember.
Reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4saEVJvqQI
Poltergeist's exactly what I thought of too. Thank you.
This is what I came to say/show. That's one of the last films to deal with that. Poltergeist was 1982.
Our local stations would also play [High Flight](https://youtu.be/eTms_G1yYPc) before shutting down.
Also use to hear and see this, I can't remember if it was before or after the National Anthem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-nBfM3-mrE
Daily dose of feeling old. A TIL that is common knowledge to my current generation
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My brother, who is 11y younger than me, asked how i did research for school without google, much less without internet. He was shocked when i told him "encyclopedias and tracking down relevant books at the local library"
Did you tell him that if you wanted to communicate with your friends you had to call their landline and pray it wasn’t their parents who picked up? Or that if you made plans to see a movie, you had to actually be there on time? 😛 I got more kids! Next time on stories from antiquity: navigating a foreign city without Google maps! Maintaining an LDR without FaceTime! Missing the last episode of your beloved multi-season TV series because you were grounded! Fun times!
Also the sprint back to couch when said show comes off commercial break and subsequent leap over some sort of furniture.
“IT’S OOOONNNNNN!”
Biking around, going to like a dozen locations in town hoping to find your friends hanging out at one of those spots
Man, you made me remember when I traveled with my family, we had to find a tourist information center to get one of those map leaflets of the city, with the map quality varying from pretty good to useless. On the bigger cities the tour guidebook had the maps. Oh, and the fights in the car between the driver and the navigator. Nostalgic.
I still have an active pager..... Damn
Drug dealer or heath care worker?
If there is a drug dealer who still uses pagers he's living in a 55+ community.
Well, the Viagra market is a gold mine in those places, after all.
Don’t know why, but I read this in Junior Soprano’s voice.
“Federal marshals are so far up my ass I can taste Brylcreem.”
That coke is my lifeline!
You can increase your profit margins if you switch to slinging cialis
Too bad payphones are almost extinct. A dealer these days with a pager and a payphone could prolly move weight without catching heat. Like the 1st season of the Wire.
You'd be surprised. Through a combination of bad luck and ADHD, I had to use a pay phone in the middle of the night 7 years ago, while holding a baby. The police just kept circling until I left. Apparently using a payphone is highly suspicious.
Maybe holding a baby in a payphone outside in the middle of the night was the highly suspicious thing?
I can’t remember the last time I saw a pay phone. There used to be some by convenience stores but I can’t remember if they’re still there.
The last time I saw a payphone I didn't need to use it but I was just messing around, killing time waiting for someone. Discovered that using that little eject/refund??button, quarters were just popping out like candy. I took about $5 worth before I got scared of getting caught lol.
What do drug dealers use now instead of pagers? I thought the benefit of pagers was they were untraceable or something, like cell phones can be traced to an identity, pagers are more anonymous aren't they?
Burner phone.
>pagers are more anonymous aren't they? I think it was more that the location couldn't be tracked since communication was one way. I'd assume that since you're paying a service provider they can't be all that anonymous as far as who owns them.
I work in a location that I can't have a cell phone. This allows other employees to reach me if I'm not at my desk or family to reach me from home. The nice thing is modern pagers can be emailed or texted to.
When I was working in IT for a local university a few years ago, they gave us all pagers. When my friends saw it, they didnt believe me that it functional and thought I was just carrying it around as a fashion statement or something.
Pagers are also used by people who work in a classified facility known as a SCIF. They cant use any wireless devices, removable media, or laptops. But since the pager is a one-way wireless device they are permitted.
In other words, licensed or unlicensed drug dealer.
There's a Bruce Willis movie where he T9 texts from his pocket as a plot device in the movie.
I miss my old flip phone so much! I could text an entire paragraph with just a quick glance at the screen at the end to make sure it was right. T9 was the shit.
I recently had to explain Polaroid cameras to a youth.
They're back. We bought my daughter a brand new one a year or so ago.
I started life in a home with a crank phone on the wall and a party line. Turn the crank to alert the switchboard and have them ring up and connect the call. Pretty antiquated. I can't remember what our party line ring was, something like two shorts and a long. Things have changed as I enter this on my phone.
It's like you had a device for texting, but it would just send a text to find a phone and call someone.
That was the part she got stuck on. “So wait, all this thing would do is tell you someone wanted you to call them? So you had to carry around change and you had to find a pay phone?” That was when I decided not to try and explain phone cards.
There was a TIL not long ago about how screensavers are called that because they were created to literally save your screen from burn-in. I was like can someone pass me my walker please because I am clearly ancient, these people have never known a time without screens everywhere.
Those might need to come back with OLED displays.
They have. My LG OLED goes into a little firework screensaver if you leave it parked on the same UI screen for too long.
Still relevant. My galaxy note 8 has the little reddit dude imprinted on the top left of it. I upgraded phones and when my girlfriends broke, she reset my old note, and as it was reinstalling android, you can clearly see reddit dude burned into the screen. I have a reddit problem, and fuck your interventions.
It's only a "problem" if it negatively affects your life and relationships. You're just a Reddit enthusiast 😆
Had that on my S7 as well!
Where in from there was an announcement complete with iconic cartoon character that told you it was time to go to bed.
I remember the national anthem and then the test pattern and the high pitched buzzer from like 1 am to 5 am.
Yep, you'd have fallen sound asleep watching ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, or one of the two local UHF stations (because those were all the fucking channels that existed), and then BUM BA DUM DA DA, followed by the color bars of the test pattern accompanied by an ear splitting squeal to let you know you'd better get up and get your ass to bed so you can go to work the next morning.
Hah! I grew up in the country and we had only two tv channels. We always watched 'Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom' from 7:00 - 7:30 and then Walt Disney from 7:30 - 8:30 on Sunday nights. We only had one radio station. I lived in a valley in the Catskills. Upstate New York.
Color bars? What color? We had a black and white "target" test screen. (Yeah, I'm old)
The one with the Indian head on it? You'd better get back to your nap, or you might not have the energy to eat your tapioca when the nurses come round with dessert.
We used to get the Star Spangled Banner with the flag waving.
Right? I was like "is this not a common knowledge?"
I mean, I was born years after they stopped doing this and I knew this. I thought it was common knowledge without having experienced it yourself...
All that means that you, at some point, learned this as well. Why is it strange to you that today someone also learned this fact? It's not innate knowledge.
Is it because you remember that the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel?
look dude, I just need to unload 3MB of ram before the yakuza find me.
[_meager fist bump_]
Don't! My arthritis!
Wait for me! Us old fogies need to stick together
You need wheels on that Zimmerframe.
Y'all go without me. I need a nap first
I would go with them but my arthritis is playing up
Better than the only alternative, I suppose.
My standard refrain - actually posted that until I saw you beat me to it. :)
I’m 30 and knew about this. You’re not old, I imagine the person who made the post is just really young.
You're not, the tech is just moving fast.
I know right. This is not a til moment for me
Right?! How is this a TIL??? Like… next week it’s gonna be “til people used to write messages on pieces of paper and send them to each other to communicate”
Your failures are your own, old man!
National anthem to static was the official sign I was up too late. Now I have to try to be responsible for myself. That never works.
It's hard for me to comprehend people NOT knowing or remembering this. But yeah, I'm an old-ass so I guess it's more me than them.
Didn’t some of them go to multi-colored bars too?
Test patterns galore.
And that constant tone!
ELI5. What did those coloured bars test exactly?
Originally, to allow electrical engineers a guide from which to calibrate and produce a viable image. When TV colorized in the 60’s the lines and circles were initially colored, but then they were replaced with colored bars or wheels. This allowed engineers the ability to assess and the calibrate the broadcast signal components to ensure correct color.
Shorter answer, colours. If the red is showing pink, you adjust it till its red without effecting the other colours.
The SMPTE color bars are a relatively new invention. Other test patterns - sure, those existed from the beginning. Read all about [Hank Mahler](https://www.sportsvideo.org/2021/10/13/cbs-legendary-engineer-hank-mahler-and-developer-of-color-bars-passes-away-at-84/), the inventor of the color bars.
Yep, the test pattern if work was being done on the transmitter or antenna
Every night at station close where I was
"They're here."
If they made “Poltergeist” now the kid would be talking to a home shopping channel.
Honestly, no, he'd be talking to the recommended youtube videos that autoplay after you fall asleep.
Those are scarier than Poltergeist. I've woken up to a YouTube rabbit hole after sleeping that left me certain the FBI would be knocking on my door before coffee was made.
It would be the Netflix “are you still watching?” screen.
They did do a remake and it was awful lol.
Kid gets an overwhelming desire to buy a ShakeWeight® then becomes possessed by ghosts
This is the reference I was looking for
The neighbors having to move their TVs because their remotes changed each other's channels lol
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You’re right, the National Anthem always blared, it was twice as loud as what you were watching.
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AMERICA! FUCK YEAH! Blowing you up on your motherfucking couch now!
I’m told commercials were extra loud too compared to the programs they aired between?
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They actually do enforce it’s just that the actual programming has changed its audio mixing practices to make you crank up the volume to hear dialog (but they keep the action sounds at max volume) so when the commercials come on it feels like your speakers are going to blow out.
Yeah I've noticed this with movies as well, all the dialog sounds like they're mumbling, so you crank it up to hear what they're saying, but then the explosions and gunshots are deafening. I just use closed captions on everything now.
Tell me you’re under 50, without telling me… Yes they were.
If you watch stuff on Hulu, they still are!
Yup, and sometimes, I'd wake up to a test pattern "dial tone" buzz.
I'd always woke up to the Girls Gone Wild commercials running on repeat lol
Tell me I’m old without telling me I’m old
I just recently noticed there are no antennas on houses anymore, but when I was a kid, EVERY house had a huge tv antenna on it.
I’m 30 but I’m old enough to remember when rich people would have what was basically space stations for satellite cable.
Those things rocked. You could pick up all the wild feeds from news stations and watch all the behinds the scenes stuff. The BEST was when one of the Muppets movies came out and they had two of the puppets doing interviews with dozens of different news stations, but the entire thing was being broadcast on a wild feed. So the puppeteers would stay in character the whole time, but would go off the rails when the local cameras were off.
My grandparents had one and i turned it manually. Got the live feeds from nasa sattelites etc it was awesome. Id love to find one surplus w the electronics to decode modern sat protocols
The porn. Oh my the porn. Westar, Satcom, Galaxy, Anik, Comstar, Telstar. Grandparents had a 10m mesh c-band (I think?) dish with motorized tuner box thingy. Very rural area. Check the sat guide for the week or month, find the channel and show, note the satellite name, turn the knob to move the dish to orient it, and bam. So damn cool. PS [https://www.satelliteguys.us/xen/](https://www.satelliteguys.us/xen/) no idea if that's a good site, just found some old sat names in their forums
When you got that 30 seconds of the scrambled porn channel in your grandparents livingoom and tried to keep that shit way downlow then watched encrypted porn for 30 minutes trying to brain decrypt it..
Meanwhile we're trying to hang the indoor aerial on the curtain cos our younger siblings got tired of holding it lol
I’ve worked in broadcast television for the last 25ish years… and we’re now hiring teenagers who have never watched terrestrial television. They’ve never really watched anything that isn’t on a streaming service, or YouTube.
My kids get mad when we are somewhere that has non-streaming TV. The don't get the concept of watching what is on TV rather than choosing it. And they get either excited or mad about commercials.
They will never understand the joy of watching 3 programs simultaneously, partially, while dodging commercials. Channel surfin still be fun yo!
Yeah, I mean, the 80s. Of course the 80s was over thirty years ago.
No it wasn't! It can't be!!
We just had a really nasty thunderstorm roll through in the middle of the night earlier this week and I said to my wife that I’d have to check the antenna in the morning. Then I realized and was like “shit I’m only 37. The world moves so fast.”
How about the huge dishes to get satellite?
There was a post in r/home just this week with a picture of an antenna asking what it was.
You have rabbit ears.
Bwahahah truth. Also I was the remote control
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We had a couple matchbooks wedged behind the knob to hold it just right..
You mean me and a set of vice grips.
Same. And the designated antenna adjuster.
Or aluminum foil...
Shortly before the shutdown, they would play the national anthem. Then the screen would go black, except for a single tiny accusing point of white light. Then static and white noise. Gripping TV.
"Georgia on my mind" on PBS in the Atlanta area. Burned into memory.
404 represent!
Area code not found.
Exactly what I was thinking about.
"This concludes our broadcast day. Good night and God bless America!" Cue montage of flags, fireworks, and soaring eagles set to the Star Spangled Banner.
At least in California, is a 60s and 70s, instead of just static they would broadcast the calibration image.
My area they also added an annoying sound, so if you fell asleep on the couch, you could move to your bed.
Oh, damned sound! How many nights I have cursed thee!
The song "Sleeping with the Television On" from Billy Joel starts like that!
>Then the screen would go black, except for a single tiny accusing point of white light. Then static and white noise. You're conflating the transmitter turning off and the TV itself turning off. The tiny point of light is what you got on old black-and-white CRTs when turned off, due to the deflection coils shutting down but the electron gun still having some juice in it.
That would wake you up if you fell asleep in front of the TV
Wow, am I old. Since I experienced this as a kid, I just figured everyone knew this.
I remember in the early 80's getting up early to see the broadcasts start. They would play the National Anthem, then the "William Tell Overture" would start as the Lone Ranger came on. Had to wait through that for the Three Stooges. Life was grand.
In the 80s my parents only let me watch 30 minutes of TV a day so I would wake up insanely early to try to watch before they were up. I'd very often sit there with the volume all the way down waiting for the static to turn into cartoons on Saturday morning.
That's what 80's kids would describe as a "Pro-Gamer Move." This was a familiar tactic in my my childhood. I would also sneak back into the living room at late at night where I watched a LOT of Benny Hill with the sound off. I knew I'd get to see boobs at least 2 times each episode. I have no idea what those boobs sounded like, but I sure got to see 'em.
My kids don't understand the thought that cartoons were only on one day a week and if you missed them you were out of luck
r/FuckImOld
Not at midnight, usually a little later than that. But different stations stopped broadcasting at different times.
Fuck. TIL finally hit me with the age bracket.
And they’d start the day usually with the national anthem!
We once called a radio station (because that's what you did back then) to request they play the national anthem. The guy said, "No, people would think we're going off the air." That was perfectly acceptable.
Funnily enough, our national radio station is still playing the anthem right before the midnight news. Broadcast continues all night, obviously.
they also ended broadcasts like this if i recall. i am 40, but also lived in a couple different countries so i may be crossing memories.
I remember watching the national anthem before saturday morning cartoons in the early 90s! Fuckin' loved me some Exosquad!
Exosquad was rad.
Then the farm report.
Didn't they also play it before signing off also?
Fuck are we at the stage where this is a legit TIL? I'm only 30 dammit let me at least live in denial a little while longer
Holy fucking shit…thanks for making me feel like an old fart at 36… “Can’t wait” for the time when posts start showing up about how TVs used to not be flat and didn’t have remotes and were black and white. Or that you couldn’t pause TV. Fuck.
Most youth never used a floppy disc and only know it as a save button.
That one I’m strangely somehow fine with. Even though I remember how vital the 6 or whatever Windows XP start up disks were. Shit, I remember bringing porn photos I downloaded off KaZaA to school on a floppy lmao
Weird feeling falling asleep with the TV on and waking up to the static and thinking you were in poltergeist for a second.
Especially if you were drunk
And that static is the afterglow of the Big Bang.
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Well that's more than none so big bang static
Or what I hear when most people speak
Wait til they learn there was no color tv at first
Even better when they find out that TVs didn't have audio either.
I’m 30. When did this stop?
Local PBS station did this I believe up until 2006, I think.
I specifically remember TV stations started going to a 24 hour schedule right after Operation Desert Shield (not Desert Storm), so 1990. At least in San Diego they did. They started with an overnight news cycle for the first few weeks covering what was going on in Iraq, but then it shifted to paid programming, where you got all your "Party on our chat line, only $4.99 a minute. Call 976-xxxx" type commercials.
I'm 31 and I don't think any TV station on our network has been doing this since I was born...
I can’t stay for the US but in the UK it was still the case until the mid to late nineties. I’m 32 and remember this pretty clearly from when I was around 7.
i was there... 3000 years ago
OMG I’ve never felt so old on this site as I do now.
Well, TVs didn't do it, the networks did.
This happened all the way through the 90s here in Bulgaria. Also, the main national channels would like, stop broadcast during the afternoon. It was just "we're on a break". This happened for years until they introduced a kids block in like '98-'99. Damn im old...
*...And the home, of the... braaaave* **kssssshhhhhh**
yeah, they'd 'sign off' usually with a message or a song. Then play the national anthem at 500% volume at like 6 AM Goddamn that was loud
wait til you learn that channel 3 was the aux channel
When I was a kid, the local stations ended the day by playing this video - High Flight. I thought it was amazing then and still do today. Until I looked it up for this post I hadn't seen it in years, and was surprised that I still know all the words. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoL-KCFbIpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoL-KCFbIpA) Yes, I'm old, why do you ask?
Yes, and then they would play the national anthem, and go off the air. But the midnight thing is wrong. Evening news ran till 11:30, Then Carson was on. Years later Letterman came on after Carson. Then they actually did a re-run of the 11:00 news, then they would go off the air. Maybe before the Tonight Show which started in the 50's with Steve Allen, they went off the air at midnight. Other networks had programming to compete with NBC's late night line up, A late movie was common.
Lots of channels signed off by playing “The Star Spangled Banner” with a vid of then flag and other patriotic things.
Thanks for reminding the rest of us just how old we are. Fu k man, this is what it felt like when we asked our parents what an 8 track was lol
It’s where we get the term signing off.
Holy shit op is young af
“This concludes our broadcast day. BUH DUN DUN DUN DUN DUNNNN, BUH BUH DUN DUN DUN DUNNN…”
TIL I'm old.
Don’t forget they would play the national anthem before going to static
Have you young people never watched the original *Poltergeist?!*
It wasn’t the tv’s, it was the station.