Sunday, August 22, 2010

Not Like The Good Old Days!

I almost forgot about this little issue, of sorts, that became a bit of a discussion recently here in our home.

Sometimes, I don't think folks realize how good we actually do have things today, compared to how they were when I was growing up.

Take for example a small thing -like television viewing -back then and now.

Today, we have cable for viewing TV programs whereas back in the day when we got the first TV set in this old house -long about 1955 I think that was -the reception we got then was downright pathetic.

Snow, snow and yes, for good measure, a whole lot more snow! And the audio -also really crappy too -all kinds of static all the time. It was not unusual to have to sit by the TV set back then, ready to do all kinds of adjustments too on the horizontal or the vertical to stop the picture -if you could call it that -from flip-flopping every which way!

Back then, if you wanted to try to improve the reception you got here, I think you'd have to have spent the majority of all your spare time reading all kinds of antenna reviews and then, even after doing that, because where this place is located -about 50 miles from the nearest broadcast station and down in a deep gully at that -getting decent reception here back then was virtually an impossibility.

I suppose today, with the improvements made to various stations in our area for more high-powered delivery of their signals and maybe even better antennas today too, reception might be improved somewhat over what it was back then.

But I, for one, don't see any sense in switching our set-up from the cable company over to one of those Dish type things -just because they might offer a few more channels than we currently get today. I figure we get about 60 channels here now, plus I have a high-speed connection to the internet via the cable company and also, this spring, I switched my telephone service over to the cable company too -so I'm actually pretty happy with the set-up we have these days.

Anyway you cut it -I can only watch one channel at a time plus, the reception being provided via this medium beats the hell out of what we had way back in those good old days!

1 comment:

terri said...

Funny... Mark and I were talking today with another couple at the kids' softball game and the topic was about how different things were "way back in the day." And we talked about how television has changed among many other changes in the world.

And we used to be happy with the 4 or 5 channels we had. Could we ever have imagined we'd have 60 or more???