I'm old enough to remember Saturday morning cartoons, but seriously, it feels like TVs don't really have channels anymore, and instead just have thousands of shitty streaming apps.
It's been about 20 years since I watched cable/broadcast TV in my home. But yeah way back tvs didn't have inputs for other devices, instead you had a box which you put in between the antenna or cable signal and your device which basically over wrote channel 3(why channel 3? I have no idea) with whatever your device was out putting. So if you wanted to play Nintendo you would change to channel 3 and see Mario or metroid.
It's been a while since I've had to do a game system setup on an old TV, (like damn near 20 years) but I think you used channel 3 because it was a channel reserved for local communications, so there would never be "TV" on that channel. Your VCR connected to the TV with a coax cable, and if you wanted to have "TV" plugged in at the same time, you either needed a TV with multiple coax inputs (I think it was common to have 2, one for VCR, and one for satellite/aerial antenna) or a coax splitter. Early on, those RCA plugs weren't built into a lot of TVs, so you needed the VCR to inject that signal onto coax for the TV. Lots (if not most/all) VCRs would let you switch the channel used in the settings, I think mainly to cover other regions where channel 3 was not standardized.
A local news station use(d? they are all digital now) channel 3, with both ota and cable. I remember using both 3 and (front) rca 'input' for my games.
I could be wrong, but I think that was what the convention was in the US at least.
Similar to how there is nothing "stopping" a web server from having a 192.168.x.x address, but we have a standard that blocks off those addresses to be used inside of your own network.
It's not the case. We had WISC-TV, the CBS affiliate, on channel 3 in our area. I seem to recall that one could switch between channel 2 and channel 3 on the Atari RF modulators, and later, VCRs could switch between channel 3 and channel 4. I think they used 2 and 3 because those were the first two channels, and the FCC wouldn't allow two adjacent channels in the same area, so one of the two would always be unused for everybody. (Oddly, there was no TV channel 1.)
Really? Interesting. We're there other places or other channels like that? Like if you were in England or India did they do channel 3, channel 4, or something totally different?
Was there a station that broadcast on channel 3? I remember TVs growing up often (always?) having support for both channels 3 and 4 as auxiliary inputs. Also, what happened to channels 1 and 2?
Ah, ok. I’m misremembering. It’s only channel one that didn’t exist. Just looked it up and apparently the FCC reallocated it in 1948 because it was causing interference with another use.
If I'm remembering right, channel 3 was all local ads when I was a kid. I think the only times I ever watched it were when I shut off whatever was using channel 3 and left the tv on.
I'm gen z but just set up tvheadend after unsubscribing from any remaining streaming services. Learning there is free tv over the air was a shock to me
That explains the slight interference I was getting. There must have been a signal just in range to scramble things but not close enough to see or hear. Our stations were on 12, 6 and 10 and you could get PBS on 32 on UHF.
Switch over for a quick round of Alex Kidd in Miracle World at my friend's place. I found it so fascinating after manually switching cables between the antenna and Commodore 64 at home.
We just had the twin lead wire coming from the antenna on the roof, through the wall, and hooked to the back of the TV. We didn't get a color TV until I was about eight years old. My mom didn't like the color, she thought they looked wrong, so we had black and white until she saw a Sony TV. (Early 70s)
The old B&W TV looked something like this:
This was our first VCR. I think this was the first digital clock we had in the house, too:
When they got a colour TV it also coincided with getting a Commodore 64, so naturally they suggested using the old TV for the computer.
Funny thing is that the C64 colour palette was prepared for this. The 16 colours weren't just random picks on the colour wheel, they also functioned as 4 different shades when shown on b&w.
Shortly after we did get the proper monitor but it still had a switch so you could still check how the your graphics looked in b&w.
Dude, I had that but didn't need it most of the time because on saturday after midnight on the French channels you would always get softcore porn like Emanuelle or something similar. I guess growing up in Quebec had its perks after all. Lol
SCART was ahead of its time. You could control connected devices with it like HDMI CEC. You could wake up devices through it. You could daisy chain devices together with it. A TV could sent its TV signal down to a SCART connected device from its tuner! No equivalent for this exists today, unless there's TV that do HDMI OUT! By the end, it could do 1080p!
Also, the TV didn't just send the currently-tuned channel 'down' the chain, it also allowed connected devices to inject their own, synced, video back into the TV, so you could be watching a show on BBC1, say, and the VCR could overlay a box in the top-right corner letting you know it had started a scheduled recording off Channel 4. Or, if you used a device like a Selectavision, if you tuned into a scrambled channel the Selectavision would notice, decode it, and send the descrambled version back up to the TV, all without the user realising it. Those clever Frenchies.
Yes, SCART's features are fucking clever but it got unwieldy thick because by the spec, each cable had to be separately shielded. Even the widescreen control signal that's mostly DC. Why not use differential pairs to reduce thickness and cost, modulate the audio and control signals together for fewer wires, and add a 5V rail to accomodate little demodulating converters (if you want separate audio devices) and eventually power PVR/tuner dongles? Most people use TV speakers anyway, that's the whole point of a single connector of an A/V standard. Not to mention how easily it fell out, almost every other connector holds better, and the ports are hard to feel on the back of the TV. If it's a giant 32" one nearly flush against a wall, good luck lining it up whenever you yank a controller cord and the vibration makes it fall off! And while a small STB can hang off RCA jacks, SCART sometimes disconnects by the weight of the cable itself. Or it gets angled so the video passthrough stops working and you only find later your VCR recorded just audio.
I think it's because of these problems, the biggest one emerged: SCART never became a worldwide standard. Nowadays, TVs are made for a world market, so even North America finally enjoys PAL-compatible sets (while most Europe-market ones and many VCRs were 3-standard since 1990), but unfortunately SCART is basically gone, not to mention very few capture cards were made with real RGB input because RCA component is stupid (why 3 connectors when no consumer ever mixes color channels? (mixing requires external sync, which is only on pro equipment and an extra cable anyway) why not decide between YPbPr and RGB before writing the standard?)
clever Frenchies
Don't say that. SCART is awesome despite its flaws but the same people also cursed half of Europe with fucking SECAM. Imagine needing a 64µs, 5MHz-bandwidth delay line just to decode color at all (unlike NTSC/PAL's QAM, SECAM's FM allows just a single chroma channel per line, alternatingly carrying U and V axes), and a frequency-modulation+pre-emphasis system in every console/camera/DVD player to encode it, plus no color killer option (disabling the colorburst) for sharp B/W like on the Apple II!
In PAL, information between subsequent lines was used too but only to correct recovered carrier phase between colorbursts, which was optional (cheaper sets kept NTSC-style hue controls) and could be handled by a locked oscillator rather than a whole-ass delay line (before shift registers (digital sequential-access-memory), every color set had fucking piezo transducers and physical waves travelling through precisely cut quartz, WTF?!).
It probably had a good reason to shock you! /s.
By design, SCART carries low voltage, not enough to shock someone. The device it was connected to could have been faulty or badly grounded and leaked higher voltage into the connector though. So its plausible.
I think some old double insulated devices have power supply issues that meant that the ground/plug-shell would be energized at half mains voltage. You wouldn't notice since the rest of the TV was wood/plastic, not metal, but if you touched the metal on the back you would get shocked.
I had an old small tv like that in my bedroom. There was a dial for vhf and another for UHF. The two UHF channels we had were about 20 and 31, but I found if I dialed it all the way to 90 or so sometimes I could hear voices talking to each other. Usually just boring phone calls, I showed my friends once and we listened to my friends uncle on a call by chance, he recognised the voice and the people he was talking about.
Then they switched mobile phones to a digital signal.
Landline portable antenna phones had some prettybad channel bleed, esp if you live in an apt complex with a local Walmart - bunch of phones would all be the same cheapo Panasonic (or whatever) model and we'd hear someone pretty often if you stand in the right spot.
A pain in the arse to drive from modern video sources is what it is! Bought a CRT recently with a thought to using it as a cool secondary monitor but HDMI to composite adaptors are all crap!
What I ended up doing was using HDMI to VGA, then VGA to composite. This let me set a proper 4:3 resolution and the picture improved a lot. What I should have done is not bother with composite at all and gone VGA to RGB to SCART as this would improve the colour a lot, but couldn’t find the adaptors for that. Not sure how widespread SCART was, might have only been a European thing but when I was a kid most TVs could either take a composite RCA input or SCART, and SCART could carry composite or RGB.
Definitely given me the bug for old TVs though, I’m going to have to write an ActivityPub to Teletext software adaptor so I can have Lemmy on a ‘90s TV or something. HackTV looks like a lot of fun as well.
"created" and "in mainstream use" are two different things.. composite video has been around for a very long time, but composite video on consumer electronics really only started to get popular maybe starting in the late-80's. I worked at a Radio Shack in the early 00's and was still explaining to people how to use it because their old VCR only had coax and they used it on channel 3 or 4. The fact that "just match the colours" was so confusing to these people was ... well... yeah.
I don't know, I kinda like that it's 1 cable per device. Definitely easier to troubleshoot audio if a cable is disconnected, versus trying to figure out why my TV isn't passing HDMI 5.1 through the fiber audio output to a wireless transmitter to all the speakers! But maybe I'm old school too...
Why 3 connectors when no consumer ever mixes color channels? (mixing between sources requires external sync, which is only on pro gear and an extra cable anyway)
Why did they not decide between YPbPr and RGB before writing the standard?
Should have just adopted SCART (European connector for bidirectional A/V, RGBA and kind of CEC), dammit
Oh a simpler time. When nothing needed to update, billion/trillionaires didn't exist, and no one was trying to steal every normal of your data to rip you off and con you politically.
I miss riding bikes till the street lights came on.
This was the era of robber barons, not long after this the US actually did something about these people, including some of the best progressive tax rates the US probably ever saw.
For example in 1951 if you had an income of $400,000, every dollar you made beyond that was taxed at 91%. That doesn't necessarily mean they paid that much, but they paid a lot more than they do nowadays.
Maybe 30 years after our first trillionaire will get our s*** together again, or maybe not.
Insecticides were hard on them in some areas.
Same reason I remeber always having a ton of squished bugs all over the windshield and radiator growing up, but cars stay much cleaner now.
Some populations are rebounding though, Saw tlmy first Monarch butterfly in 15 years the other day
True they are. Some of the monarch habitats are threatened, the one in Santa Barbara/Goleta has greatly been reduced over the years.
I too remember great bug swarms growing up in a desert area. Caterpillars covering the road making popping noises as you drove over them. And I hadn't thought of bugs on cars in a long time so you do make a good point.
I remember being so excited when my family got a box to convert composite cables to coaxial so they would work with our old TV. I got my friend to bring over his gamecube all the time until I finally got my own after a few months.
I typed the long form of this before, but I bought a projector with no sound system, and just hooked up my existing small TV to the composite audio and the display to the projector
Only if they're mismatched from one end to the other. You can use any color cable as long as both ends go in the same color port (eg yellow cable connecting the red ports). Also, you could totally do redPort-whitePort, your Left/Right would just be reversed.
I'm literally watching a baseball game with the right picture in the back of my second monitor, and it's plugged into an adapter for the left picture in my PC.
Just came across a bunch of composite cables in a bin I was going through as I'm moving. I've got way too much of this kind of stuff that I need to get rid of. I hate moving.
Yeah... even older... I still have an Intelivision, which was not purchased used! It was my parents, but it was handed down to me and I kept it ever since. If I ever get my life together one day I would love to set all my old stuff back up in a dedicated area and go through what I have and clean it all up and pray most of it still works.
Introduced in the 1930s by the Radio Corporation of America, they use color-coded plugs—typically red and white/black for stereo audio, and yellow for video.
Still in use. Cassette player is in storage, dry rotted belts that I need to replace. Need some better speakers as well, the shelf speakers I have are pretty garbage but my office space is limited.
Yes I am that old.
I am so old that when I was a kid my first PC was running DOS with windows 3.1.
Granted it was because my parents couldn't afford a brand new PC with Windows 95.
So at 5-6 years old I was typing "CD JAZZ enter JAZZ" to open The shareware Jazz Jackrabbit.
My first real console was the PS1 at eight years old and I used the plugs in that picture.
Thankyou for coming with me down my history, I don't talk about it for you. I talk about it so I don't forget it..
Two stereo audio (red, white) and one video(yellow). Called rca composite.
The colours one you are thinking about was called YPbPr Component connector and it split the video signal in multiple colour channels for clearer video signal.
When having S-Video was the shit and knowing that the white cable never needed to be used. I guess if you wanted surround sound but the red was stereo and the white was mono so if you wanted true stereo sound supposedly you only went with the red but that was debated.
204 replies
I'm "turn to channel 3" old...
You could feel the static charge shift when changing channels
Yeah which explains my hair in those days
Yeah but I had a knock off brans
TVs had channels?
I'm old enough to remember Saturday morning cartoons, but seriously, it feels like TVs don't really have channels anymore, and instead just have thousands of shitty streaming apps.
It's been about 20 years since I watched cable/broadcast TV in my home. But yeah way back tvs didn't have inputs for other devices, instead you had a box which you put in between the antenna or cable signal and your device which basically over wrote channel 3(why channel 3? I have no idea) with whatever your device was out putting. So if you wanted to play Nintendo you would change to channel 3 and see Mario or metroid.
It's been a while since I've had to do a game system setup on an old TV, (like damn near 20 years) but I think you used channel 3 because it was a channel reserved for local communications, so there would never be "TV" on that channel. Your VCR connected to the TV with a coax cable, and if you wanted to have "TV" plugged in at the same time, you either needed a TV with multiple coax inputs (I think it was common to have 2, one for VCR, and one for satellite/aerial antenna) or a coax splitter. Early on, those RCA plugs weren't built into a lot of TVs, so you needed the VCR to inject that signal onto coax for the TV. Lots (if not most/all) VCRs would let you switch the channel used in the settings, I think mainly to cover other regions where channel 3 was not standardized.
A local news station use(d? they are all digital now) channel 3, with both ota and cable. I remember using both 3 and (front) rca 'input' for my games.
I remember the coax cable but did not know about channel 3 being local communication. I thought it was just convention.
Thanks for teaching me.
I could be wrong, but I think that was what the convention was in the US at least.
Similar to how there is nothing "stopping" a web server from having a 192.168.x.x address, but we have a standard that blocks off those addresses to be used inside of your own network.
It's not the case. We had WISC-TV, the CBS affiliate, on channel 3 in our area. I seem to recall that one could switch between channel 2 and channel 3 on the Atari RF modulators, and later, VCRs could switch between channel 3 and channel 4. I think they used 2 and 3 because those were the first two channels, and the FCC wouldn't allow two adjacent channels in the same area, so one of the two would always be unused for everybody. (Oddly, there was no TV channel 1.)
I had a nes and that switched between 3 to 4. My next console was n64 which had the 3 wires you see in the original post
We forget how much TV was boring AF.
They still do if you use an antenna.
Unless you were in Cleveland.....then it was Channel 4.
Really? Interesting. We're there other places or other channels like that? Like if you were in England or India did they do channel 3, channel 4, or something totally different?
Canada was either channel 3 or 4 depending on the device. Probably all American made then.
Was there a station that broadcast on channel 3? I remember TVs growing up often (always?) having support for both channels 3 and 4 as auxiliary inputs. Also, what happened to channels 1 and 2?
Channel 2 is KDKA CBS in Pittsburgh.
Ah, ok. I’m misremembering. It’s only channel one that didn’t exist. Just looked it up and apparently the FCC reallocated it in 1948 because it was causing interference with another use.
If I'm remembering right, channel 3 was all local ads when I was a kid. I think the only times I ever watched it were when I shut off whatever was using channel 3 and left the tv on.
But I just got comfortable!
Just be happy you don't have to move the rabbit ears around till I get a good image
Anymore.
I'm gen z but just set up tvheadend after unsubscribing from any remaining streaming services. Learning there is free tv over the air was a shock to me
The real age here is the "turn" part of the comment.
Wait current tvs don't have a channel knob?
Sometimes I used channel 4 if the signal wasn't working. Coaxials were shitty.
Which is worse? Coaxials or Co workers?
I am this many years old.
I am this old as well but there's a reason I always have a screwdriver handy
Oh ye with a weak thumbnail!
I have that exact model with my 2600!
crumbles into dust
I modified my 2600 to have composite output instead. It also slightly improves the video quality
My brother/sister thank you, that takes me back. Had the og Nintendo going through that
I feel simultaneously seen and called out.
Before my time but I did run across these as a kid. Even played a few games, too.
Came here to post this.
This was the only thing station included up till and including the fucking Jaguar.
Jeez. You old! Damn, me too. Nowadays such a device would be 79,99 ans surely sold separately. Without cables of course.
As far as I remember that thing came with the 2600, no?
I seem to remember the NES having a similar splitter?
Came here to say the same
Beat me to it. Life got really good when I could upgrade from the small kitchen B/W set to a color one.
What channel would you use? I always used channel three and swore channel four gave a worse signal.
In my area channel 4 had a TV station on it and channel 3 didn't, so channel 3 was the available default for these things.
That explains the slight interference I was getting. There must have been a signal just in range to scramble things but not close enough to see or hear. Our stations were on 12, 6 and 10 and you could get PBS on 32 on UHF.
dude... i hooked up my sega master system II to my TV up the Antenna port with that little switch box.
This guy olds.
This. This is how old. OP needs to get off my lawn.
There it is!
Switch over for a quick round of Alex Kidd in Miracle World at my friend's place. I found it so fascinating after manually switching cables between the antenna and Commodore 64 at home.
Same. Except Atari, and Nintendo too
Same. Except generic Pong console.
That I played by myself and got it to bounce back and forth so I could go to the bathroom. Oh mine was legit Atari Pong.
Spectravideo and NES for me.
I’m this old.
But did you have separate VHF and UHF connectors on the back?
I believe there was a toggle switch on set controls (no remote).
Separate nobs for UHF and VHF as well.
This is why I have chips out of my shins.
I miss my waterbed
I miss your waterbed too.
I also miss 73rdnemesio’s water bed.
That two timing slut!
I once signed an apartment rental agreement that had a waterbed addendum, specifically banning their usage.
Weird. Me too and I was just thinking about that this morning.
Most of them banned it since they’d break and flash flood the building
Pretty sure I had that exact water bed frame
How did everyone have this exact bed‽
We just had the twin lead wire coming from the antenna on the roof, through the wall, and hooked to the back of the TV. We didn't get a color TV until I was about eight years old. My mom didn't like the color, she thought they looked wrong, so we had black and white until she saw a Sony TV. (Early 70s)
The old B&W TV looked something like this:
This was our first VCR. I think this was the first digital clock we had in the house, too:
Whoa... Not flashing 12:00, check out Linus Torvalds here.
LOL. That's not a picture of our actual VCR, just one of the same model.
But, my dad was an aircraft mechanic. He knew his way around tech well enough. Our clocks were always set correctly, as it happens.
Everything back then weighed 80-100lbs.
Except tvs, they weighed even more.
My parents had a b&w TV into the mid 80s.
When they got a colour TV it also coincided with getting a Commodore 64, so naturally they suggested using the old TV for the computer.
Funny thing is that the C64 colour palette was prepared for this. The 16 colours weren't just random picks on the colour wheel, they also functioned as 4 different shades when shown on b&w.
Shortly after we did get the proper monitor but it still had a switch so you could still check how the your graphics looked in b&w.
I am this old.
I totally saw a boob!
Are you sure? It might have been an elbow.
I think you are watching some illegal channels
I can hear this picture
Dude, I had that but didn't need it most of the time because on saturday after midnight on the French channels you would always get softcore porn like Emanuelle or something similar. I guess growing up in Quebec had its perks after all. Lol
I must be too young, I grew up on this:
SCART was ahead of its time. You could control connected devices with it like HDMI CEC. You could wake up devices through it. You could daisy chain devices together with it. A TV could sent its TV signal down to a SCART connected device from its tuner! No equivalent for this exists today, unless there's TV that do HDMI OUT! By the end, it could do 1080p!
Also, the TV didn't just send the currently-tuned channel 'down' the chain, it also allowed connected devices to inject their own, synced, video back into the TV, so you could be watching a show on BBC1, say, and the VCR could overlay a box in the top-right corner letting you know it had started a scheduled recording off Channel 4. Or, if you used a device like a Selectavision, if you tuned into a scrambled channel the Selectavision would notice, decode it, and send the descrambled version back up to the TV, all without the user realising it. Those clever Frenchies.
Yes, SCART's features are fucking clever but it got unwieldy thick because by the spec, each cable had to be separately shielded. Even the widescreen control signal that's mostly DC. Why not use differential pairs to reduce thickness and cost, modulate the audio and control signals together for fewer wires, and add a 5V rail to accomodate little demodulating converters (if you want separate audio devices) and eventually power PVR/tuner dongles? Most people use TV speakers anyway, that's the whole point of a single connector of an A/V standard. Not to mention how easily it fell out, almost every other connector holds better, and the ports are hard to feel on the back of the TV. If it's a giant 32" one nearly flush against a wall, good luck lining it up whenever you yank a controller cord and the vibration makes it fall off! And while a small STB can hang off RCA jacks, SCART sometimes disconnects by the weight of the cable itself. Or it gets angled so the video passthrough stops working and you only find later your VCR recorded just audio.
I think it's because of these problems, the biggest one emerged: SCART never became a worldwide standard. Nowadays, TVs are made for a world market, so even North America finally enjoys PAL-compatible sets (while most Europe-market ones and many VCRs were 3-standard since 1990), but unfortunately SCART is basically gone, not to mention very few capture cards were made with real RGB input because RCA component is stupid (why 3 connectors when no consumer ever mixes color channels? (mixing requires external sync, which is only on pro equipment and an extra cable anyway) why not decide between YPbPr and RGB before writing the standard?)
Don't say that. SCART is awesome despite its flaws but the same people also cursed half of Europe with fucking SECAM. Imagine needing a 64µs, 5MHz-bandwidth delay line just to decode color at all (unlike NTSC/PAL's QAM, SECAM's FM allows just a single chroma channel per line, alternatingly carrying U and V axes), and a frequency-modulation+pre-emphasis system in every console/camera/DVD player to encode it, plus no color killer option (disabling the colorburst) for sharp B/W like on the Apple II!
In PAL, information between subsequent lines was used too but only to correct recovered carrier phase between colorbursts, which was optional (cheaper sets kept NTSC-style hue controls) and could be handled by a locked oscillator rather than a whole-ass delay line (before shift registers (digital sequential-access-memory), every color set had fucking piezo transducers and physical waves travelling through precisely cut quartz, WTF?!).
Was it able to shock me with one end connected or is it just a false memory.
It probably had a good reason to shock you! /s.
By design, SCART carries low voltage, not enough to shock someone. The device it was connected to could have been faulty or badly grounded and leaked higher voltage into the connector though. So its plausible.
I think some old double insulated devices have power supply issues that meant that the ground/plug-shell would be energized at half mains voltage. You wouldn't notice since the rest of the TV was wood/plastic, not metal, but if you touched the metal on the back you would get shocked.
I combined those 3 plugs into this with a small plug.
As a boy I had to stand up and walk to the TV to switch channel pressing buttons. No remote.
And then you pull too hard on the power button and it comes off and you get hit/yelled at by dad
I had an old small tv like that in my bedroom. There was a dial for vhf and another for UHF. The two UHF channels we had were about 20 and 31, but I found if I dialed it all the way to 90 or so sometimes I could hear voices talking to each other. Usually just boring phone calls, I showed my friends once and we listened to my friends uncle on a call by chance, he recognised the voice and the people he was talking about.
Then they switched mobile phones to a digital signal.
Landline portable antenna phones had some prettybad channel bleed, esp if you live in an apt complex with a local Walmart - bunch of phones would all be the same cheapo Panasonic (or whatever) model and we'd hear someone pretty often if you stand in the right spot.
Now that's what I call a proper television
My TV only had 4 button for 4 channels so once we got more than 4 channels we had to use a small wheel to change frequencies and look for them.
That's a new one to me. Great Britain, I assume.
Unitra was a Polish brand that existed during communism.
I was the "go find the pliers to turn the channel, cause the knob went missing last year" kid.
Just kept the small vice grip clamped on it.
You were supposed to sit close enough to the tv to always reach it.
I had to get up and hit it on the side with a dead blow hammer when the screen turned green as well.
Yo my dad would lay on the couch after work and scream for me or my brother to come change the channel. Those were the fucking days...
Does this answer your question?
Also I don't think composite is that old tbf.
Ooh, I get to trot out my console humblebragging picture again.
A pain in the arse to drive from modern video sources is what it is! Bought a CRT recently with a thought to using it as a cool secondary monitor but HDMI to composite adaptors are all crap!
What I ended up doing was using HDMI to VGA, then VGA to composite. This let me set a proper 4:3 resolution and the picture improved a lot. What I should have done is not bother with composite at all and gone VGA to RGB to SCART as this would improve the colour a lot, but couldn’t find the adaptors for that. Not sure how widespread SCART was, might have only been a European thing but when I was a kid most TVs could either take a composite RCA input or SCART, and SCART could carry composite or RGB.
Definitely given me the bug for old TVs though, I’m going to have to write an ActivityPub to Teletext software adaptor so I can have Lemmy on a ‘90s TV or something. HackTV looks like a lot of fun as well.
Created in 1954–1956 in wiki is correct
"created" and "in mainstream use" are two different things.. composite video has been around for a very long time, but composite video on consumer electronics really only started to get popular maybe starting in the late-80's. I worked at a Radio Shack in the early 00's and was still explaining to people how to use it because their old VCR only had coax and they used it on channel 3 or 4. The fact that "just match the colours" was so confusing to these people was ... well... yeah.
I have the same answer 😅
I’m this old
SCART is newer than composite, though..
Didn't say they were the oldest, just that they are that old
I'm this old - old TV, new for the time console
Channel 3
Definitely had this as well.
I had RF adapters for my NES...
I had to get a new TV since my old one had the two screw posts that the Atari hooked up to.
I'm also this old.
It's wild that we absolutely needed 2 cables for Audio but that one ought to do for Video.
It makes perfect sense since it is analog, each of them provides signal to a separate device. You had one screen and two speakers.
I don't know, I kinda like that it's 1 cable per device. Definitely easier to troubleshoot audio if a cable is disconnected, versus trying to figure out why my TV isn't passing HDMI 5.1 through the fiber audio output to a wireless transmitter to all the speakers! But maybe I'm old school too...
Well the good news with Fiber is you can literally see if it's passing data. Can't see electrons.
No, but sometimes you can taste them.
Please do not try to taste the electrons.
No left and right video
You joke but the next evolution up was literally Red Green Blue for the 3 colors to make up an image
That (RCA component) was fucking stupid.
Why 3 connectors when no consumer ever mixes color channels? (mixing between sources requires external sync, which is only on pro gear and an extra cable anyway)
Why did they not decide between YPbPr and RGB before writing the standard?
Should have just adopted SCART (European connector for bidirectional A/V, RGBA and kind of CEC), dammit
I am SCART old
Oh a simpler time. When nothing needed to update, billion/trillionaires didn't exist, and no one was trying to steal every normal of your data to rip you off and con you politically. I miss riding bikes till the street lights came on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller
Remember the warm glow of the yellow/orange street lights? There gone now too, just like the hummingbirds and the fireflies.
Why did you have to shatter the small bit of perceived relief I had!!??
Thought you might want to know. Information is power.
100%. It is always better to know. I think that's what draws us all to this place.
At the same time, fuuuuuck man. 😔
I think capitalism is humanities terminal illness.
So much potential wasted.
"Now I know!"
"And knowing is half the battle!"
This was the era of robber barons, not long after this the US actually did something about these people, including some of the best progressive tax rates the US probably ever saw.
For example in 1951 if you had an income of $400,000, every dollar you made beyond that was taxed at 91%. That doesn't necessarily mean they paid that much, but they paid a lot more than they do nowadays.
Maybe 30 years after our first trillionaire will get our s*** together again, or maybe not.
I saw fireflies on the 4th, I even managed to pick one up.and we've got humming birds in our backyard. Humming birds and firefly's are gone?
Insecticides were hard on them in some areas. Same reason I remeber always having a ton of squished bugs all over the windshield and radiator growing up, but cars stay much cleaner now.
Some populations are rebounding though, Saw tlmy first Monarch butterfly in 15 years the other day
True they are. Some of the monarch habitats are threatened, the one in Santa Barbara/Goleta has greatly been reduced over the years.
I too remember great bug swarms growing up in a desert area. Caterpillars covering the road making popping noises as you drove over them. And I hadn't thought of bugs on cars in a long time so you do make a good point.
I'm quite a bit older than those
I am this old.
I continue to be shocked to discover things that seemed very recent to me are now a decade or two old. I probably shouldn’t be, but here I am.
You are definitely underestimating the average age of a Lemmy user
(unrelated but boops the kitty)
Kitty receives your boop :3
what do you think is the average age is of those who spend regular time in this specific group?
I'm gonna say 35-40 based on nothing but vibes and assumptions
I'm in my 20s and regularly did this as a child.
Yellow is video. White is left channel audio. Red is right channel audio.
I remember being so excited when my family got a box to convert composite cables to coaxial so they would work with our old TV. I got my friend to bring over his gamecube all the time until I finally got my own after a few months.
I see that and raise you computer programs you got from magazines you had to type in for an hour.
Wow, stereo TV, fancy.
The red one is for dangling.
Just used one a couple days ago.
Reminds me, I should go through my old box of DVDs and do some cleaning.
I typed the long form of this before, but I bought a projector with no sound system, and just hooked up my existing small TV to the composite audio and the display to the projector
Hehehe, mismatched color ports go bzzzzzzzzzzzz
Only if they're mismatched from one end to the other. You can use any color cable as long as both ends go in the same color port (eg yellow cable connecting the red ports). Also, you could totally do redPort-whitePort, your Left/Right would just be reversed.
Who doesn't know RCA? That's left, right, and sub!
Give me a second to switch my oscilloscope to XY mode.
still have some in a bag in my scrap catcher drawer
Older
Is that old? I still have devices using tulp. Modern day mixers and CDJ's still use tulp connections, as do proper amps.
I'm this old:
That's old? Try this
"not THAT kind of PS2..."
Yours needed a dongle to connect to the serial port?!
And what the hell is that thing between the left and right buttons?
Ah yeas, forgot about that one. I'm that old that I'm starting to forget things.
I'm literally watching a baseball game with the right picture in the back of my second monitor, and it's plugged into an adapter for the left picture in my PC.
I'm 39.
Same. Time for a monitor and gpu upgrade mate.
Oh I know. Single income family on a farm makes money for that sort of stuff a little tight.
Yes.
My modern ish sony Bravia TV still has these. My PS2 is currently connected to them.
Just came across a bunch of composite cables in a bin I was going through as I'm moving. I've got way too much of this kind of stuff that I need to get rid of. I hate moving.
You know how you think it's better to keep them, just in case?
It is.
Weird obscure cable you haven’t used in 10 years?
Guaranteed to need it 7 days after getting rid of it
I really loved those kitchen gadgets back then. These days, you really don't have separate lines for mustard, mayo and ketchup anymore.
Yeah? Those were on the ps2
💀💀💀💀
When I've got this ancient...? Why am I mummified?
Yeah... even older... I still have an Intelivision, which was not purchased used! It was my parents, but it was handed down to me and I kept it ever since. If I ever get my life together one day I would love to set all my old stuff back up in a dedicated area and go through what I have and clean it all up and pray most of it still works.
Everyone saying they are older than these, but composite video dates back to the 1950s.
1930s
Introduced in the 1930s by the Radio Corporation of America, they use color-coded plugs—typically red and white/black for stereo audio, and yellow for video.
I think RCA plugs are from the thirties but they definitely didn't have composite video back then! They were developed mid-50s.
Bitch i'm this old
wait, you could plug something to the TV ? the two wires going out of mine was electricity and antenna, and no remote.
Sadly, yes
Those are modern! My audio equipment used DIN plugs. And the tv only had an antenna input.
Nice, still in use? Show the front too, these are pretty looking receivers.
Still in use. Cassette player is in storage, dry rotted belts that I need to replace. Need some better speakers as well, the shelf speakers I have are pretty garbage but my office space is limited.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81uf140GdiL._UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg
Yes. Very yes.
I am black and white TV, no VCR invented yet old.
Yes I am that old. I am so old that when I was a kid my first PC was running DOS with windows 3.1. Granted it was because my parents couldn't afford a brand new PC with Windows 95.
So at 5-6 years old I was typing "CD JAZZ enter JAZZ" to open The shareware Jazz Jackrabbit.
My first real console was the PS1 at eight years old and I used the plugs in that picture.
Thankyou for coming with me down my history, I don't talk about it for you. I talk about it so I don't forget it..
Yes
Ones for internet, ones for tv and ones for sound. Never really understood what the white was for.. 😆
Uh... Afaik, internet data does not use rca. The yellow is video, the white is left audio, the red is right audio (together, stereo sound).
You’re absolutely correct. All i knew was that one was video and one was audio. Didn’t know audio split.. spanks!!
I do not miss these. The RCA wires were so frail on most consoles. At least you could repair cables with spare parts from Radio Shack back then.
I've just read about Tandy.
Easily. I had two computers before I had one that was this advanced.
One was for video, one for audio and one for colors, no?
Two stereo audio (red, white) and one video(yellow). Called rca composite.
The colours one you are thinking about was called YPbPr Component connector and it split the video signal in multiple colour channels for clearer video signal.
No, yellow is video, red and white are audio channels. You might be thinking of component video, but that doesn't include audio in the three cables.
When having S-Video was the shit and knowing that the white cable never needed to be used. I guess if you wanted surround sound but the red was stereo and the white was mono so if you wanted true stereo sound supposedly you only went with the red but that was debated.
That's not how the audio works on cinch.
Red is the right channel and white is the left channel, so you need both for stereo.
If you use just one you just hear one side.
I was a kid when I heard that and never thought to look it up. It seemed legit at the time.