D (for Digital) Day Arrives. What's Your Oldest TV Memory?

Please.
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Nothing lamer then a youngin complaining about feeling old. 40. Bah!
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Oldest (greatest?) television memory? This is easy. For anyone who was around and saw it:
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Jan. 1, 1954.
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Tournament of Roses parade. It was nominally broadcast in color across the country, but no one actually had color tvs (I wouldn’t own my first until two years later), but there were product promotions (old school, community attended viewing parties, I guess you could call em). Me and the missus (still courting not yet married) attended one of those, and we were blown away.
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Hard to articulate how a dramatic of a change it was to see television in color when here-to-fore it was only a black and white medium. Paradigm shift in the truest way.
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Later that evening I made a passionate rant how color tv would destroy people’s desire to read books and in 100 years books would be near extinct.
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I my have called that putt a little early.

About the conversion… I have been a college student for the past four years. Because of this, I had no money. Because of this, I didn’t have cable.
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Because of this I bought a digital converter box with my rebate a few months ago. First of all, it was interesting that the rebates were for $30 and that all the boxes I could find started at $35 except one that was only carried by Radioshack, my local Radioshack being out of them. Having inserted my converter in between my $25 rabbit ears and my television and having plugged it in (adding another electronic device to my electricity bill and my carbon footprint), I realized what an interesting technological change it is to go from an analog to digital signal.
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Analog signals are wave forms which means that if a signal is weak, you get a weak and fuzzy picture. You will always get a picture until there is no signal left for the TV to translate. Digital signals, on the other hand, are information sent in discrete packets, or bundles, of data. This means that if a digital receiver doesn’t get a strong enough signal, doesn’t get enough packets, it can’t put together the information properly and won’t give you a picture at all or will give you long moments of screen shots and no audio.
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The town I live in has always had bad reception. The difference for me after the conversion is that, where before many of my channels were fuzzy to different degrees–one to such a degree that I had abandoned it, now I don’t get two or three at all and a quarter of the time I switch channels I have to get up and readjust my rabbit ears so that the signal is strong enough that my digital converter box will give me a picture.
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I think this whole thing is a failure. And the best part is that the only people who are going to experience these problems, who aren’t going to have cable, are going to be lower income people who tend not to spend their time writing Congressmen and complaining in blog comment sections–grad students and retired folks aside–because they’re too busy trying to make enough money to pay rent and put food on the table. I sure hope the government did something good with the bandwidth that they freed up by getting rid of the analog signals.. Oh wait, that’s right, it was auctioned off to the telecom corporations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/700_MHz_wireless_spectrum_auction

Not quite as far back as Ashman, but same context. My Dad was trialing a new “Color” TV, around 1962-3. I was very young. In any case, the only show that was regularly broadcast in color was on NBC, I am blanking on the show, variety show I am sure. It started after my bedtime, but my sister and I were allowed to stay up an extra five minutes to see the NBC peacock in color. It was magic.

Today’s equivalent to rabbit ears and static, is getting your HD/Dolby 5.1 sound to sync up right. What a royal pain in the a$$!

Earliest memory is of my idiot brother deciding that the top of the tv would be a good place to put his glass of milk. A split second later he realized it was not a good place as the contents of the glass spilled into the back of the tv. We watched as the picture shrunk to a single horizontal line across the middle of the screen. That line then shrunk to a single point in the middle of the screen. Then our tv was gone, not to be replaced for three years.

Well, I am 21 so I don’t think I have anything interesting to say about any revoltuionary TV moments. I don’t even think I have a earliest memory.
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One unique thing about living in Michigan, and James probabably knows this,is that we also get CBC (Canadian Broadcast Company). So when my dad was growing up they always had four channel while the rest of the country had three. In fact, I would be watching CBC tonight to see the Red Wings when the Stanly Cup. But they don’t have an HD channel. My dad hates NBC’s telecast because they show commercials while the National Anthem is going on. CBC always airs the “The Star Spangled Banner.” It doesn’t bug me as must as him because I always see things from the business end. And NBC needs all the commercial spots they can get.

Not my earliest TV memory, but we had one with a dial that went from like 1 to 13 with a tv antenna. Which was plenty because we only got 4 stations. (NBC, CBS and 2 different ABC affiliates.) When cable finally came to my small town, you got a box with a sliding lever on the top. Suddenly, we used all 13 channels. And you could flip the lever so that you now had other stations that you could access by flipping the same dial. I think we had around 18 or 20 channels. It seems so quaint now, but back then we thought we were The Jetsons…..

Crusader Rabbit, Topper, My Little Margie, I Led 3 Lives, Highway Patrol, Naked City. Horizontal Control, Vertical Control.

Yup, another geezer.

But the Digital TV transition is no trouble at all if your cables are correctly polarized. Go to Screen 47 of the DTV Converter Box On-Screen Installation Guide and use the resident GPS to correctly align your antenna for each channel, allowing for local ionospheric conditions, and ARRRGGGHH!

Technical reference:

http://notionscapital.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/tv-d-day-usa/

Our TV (color!) caught fire while I was watching Star Trek. I didn’t understand why smoke was coming out of Mr. Spock’s head.

watching return of the jedi on tv back in the 80′s, i am sure there are eariler ones for some. but just not any tv. it was a furnitured style, i dont recall the real name for it. had dials no remote, wood paneling, real wood. watched it lying down under the pull out matteress as a kid. or watching the only tape we had in the house. The princess bride on VHS. we couldnt afford beta.

I remember watching coverage of JFK’s assasination. I had just turned three. I realized that something very sad had just happened.