Flashback....

Whew!! You had me worried for a minute there, Richard. When I saw the thread line I thought you might have taken some LSD.

John

Nah, never touched the stuff (or anything similar), even back in the old days. I'm currently reading the bio of the Beach Boys and wow were they messed up. I hope those surviving members never have flashbacks. :lol:

In early '86 I lived in Arlington, VA. we had 36 channels that included separate full time channels for the county board, school board, schools and the library.

I thought I was in heaven when i moved to Fairfax, VA. They told me that they had 120 channels of course they did not tell me that 24 had no programming and that channels 61-120 (icluding WTBS, ESPN and several other basic channels) were scrambled, or that I had to rent not only their box but also the remote at $1.00 a month.

Boy I hated my cable companies.

I'll never forget my first experience with cable.

1976. Time-Warner Cable, Nashua NH. *TWELVE* channels! How cool was THAT! We even got 'backup' versions of the networks because our system was allowed to bring in not only Boston, but channels 10 (WJAR) & 12 (WPRI) from Providence RI - WMUR from Manchester NH was a backup for Boston's WCVB. But the big thing is those pre-HBO days (I think HBO and the 36-channel version of the system showed up around '79 or so) was CKSH - Channel 9 from Sherbrooke, Quebec - in French (Nashua had a lot of old French immigrants). The carried the Olympics and Expos baseball among other things as an SRC (CBC's French version) affiliate.

But it was at night - after minight - when the 'adult' stuff would play, unscrambled for any late-night eyes to see. EVERY kid in school knew about that...

CH 53 sounds interesting - I wonder if Charlie would consider it
compelling enuff to add to the Dish lineup if it's still around? :sure:

I think that channel 53 was a sports channel, not the kind of sport you are thinking of though. Minneapolis had a dual coax cable system with an A/B switch to change between coax. Some of the channels were on cable A and others were on Cabel B. Very strange setup

Very cool! I never had fewer than 36 channels myself (cable reached me around 1981), but in the mid-80s, I stayed at a mom & pop motel with 12-channel cable.

Thanks for posting that guide.

I can't imagine having that many local "PI" channels on a system. The systems I grew up with (if you can call high school growing up) didn't have community channels. I seem to remember one channel on the system that played audio from the local radio station and a PC/DOS based slide show. Every once in a while you would catch the operators changing the text on the slides. I understood that they would interrupt that channel for local video every once in a while but I never knew the schedule.

The first "CATV" system was too long ago to remember all of the details but it was true community antenna. Just the locals from many miles away being repeated via cable. Of course that was in the age before satellites were used for cable.

I've got one of those old cable cards somewhere from the early 80's ... which box, I don't know.

The funny thing about the Minneapolis system is that they were very late to the game. I think it was well into the '80's before the city had cable. I used to visit a GF in a small town (Bird Island, Mn) in the early '70's and they had a CATV system that was better than what Minneapolis had, even though it was just locals out of Minneapolis from a community antenna. Of course at that time Minneapolis had nothing in the way of cable.