Very cool! A real time machine.
https://www.toonamiaftermath.com/schedule
You can also get it running in Plex (requires Plex pass) with these two projects:
Of course if you live in an apartment that may not work.
http://users.wfu.edu/matthews/misc/dipole.html https://www.w9dup.org/technet_files/folded_dipoles_vhf_uhf_y...
UHF only goes up to channel 52 now, though. Before 2009 it went up to channel 70, and before 1983 UHF went all the way up to 83.
Even in more densely populated areas there were blank channels you'd flip through, and where I grew up there were only two channels that came in most of the time with another 1-2 that'd briefly become available at certain times of day or during specific weather where atmospheric conditions boosted the signal strength of those stations.
Very old TV's did not have memorized channels, and so you had to tune to find the next channel, which would give you a progression to static and back.
Then TV had a memory for the channel frequency. It would switch instantaneously the video. So fast that sometimes you could see the first frame in black and white. Then color info would come (color TV is atop of black and white and spread over frames if I recall). Then mono sound would come in. Then stereo (like color, the stereo signal is an augmentation). Still all of that faster than any modern technology.
Then came digital TVs (still receiving analog TV signal) which could have a second or two of digital lag during channel change, but it wouldn't display static, simply a blank (dark) screen.
When I first connected it, I cycled through ALL the channels. There were about 800.
Trying to set it up now seems nearly impossible, but if they planned for it then it may have been possible.
Recording ~5 hours of television a night would have been a trivial cost for a network like NBC. Particularly compared to the licensing fees those hours would have had.
I was 5.
In general, the affiliate nature would add a wrinkle to the whole thing, but not an insurmountable one. If nothing else, they could have used the broadcast from the affiliates they owned.
For example, in my area, the main stations were at 4, 5, and 8. Switching from 5 to 4, I'd see no static because they're adjacent. Switching from 5 to 8, I'd see static while the knob was at 6 and 7.
The 60s, 70s, and 80s TV sets on the site are the style I'm talking about. The 90s and 2000s TVs aren't.
The best way to do it would be to use different transitions depending on the style of TV depicted. But the way they did it is not wrong for all analog TVs.
One of my billionaire fantasies was to one day archive all of TV Guide and then use that to line up airing blocks for each decade at the start of every decade and then have it available as a streaming option.
Either way! Thank you so much for this!
The static effect is nice for creating a low-fi vibe, but some kind of CRT effect (like many arcade & console emulators have) would be even better.
But I did it anyway and it's interesting to see the complete shift in tone from pre-9/11 to post-9/11 coverage. Everyone was so positive and excited pre-9/11 despite the fact that we were already plummeting into a recession.
I'd forgotten about that.
All those pauses and waits are an artifact of later computerized/digital technology.
IIRC, it wasn’t uncommon for UHF dials to be continuous while VHF had precise stops and switched directly from channel to channel, so in UHF, as a practical matter, you'd have static between tuned channels, while that was not the case in VHF.
Its been a long time since I had a TV work a tuning dial, but that's what I recall.
You can set channel weighting distributions, add watermarks, schedules, practically anything that you’d want,
How many people don't even know what it was like to keep flipping channels.
- Married with Children
- The Simpsons
- Fresh Prince of Bel Air
- SNL
- Airwolf
- Knight Rider
- The A-Team
It doesn't recreate standing and pointing in just right pose adjusting rabbit ears. They were impossible to tune them because touching them changes their parameters greatly. Some people put aluminum foil balls on the ends.
Many older TVs supported NTSC UHF (OTA) channels up to 83 and beyond, but the maximum channel was 69 because 70–83 were reallocated in 1983.
To hookup a Nintendo or Atari (NTSC) to an older TV, a box like this would be needed to switch between the console and the OTA antenna.[0] Some of them included an additional switch to select either channels 2 or 3. In the transition to coax, sometimes they would have or need a push on matching transformer to work with newer TVs. Nintendo released (included?) a coax-only auto switch.
0. https://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/tvswitch_2_large...
You've quite a few barriers to getting that stuff online.
1. Sure, someone taped 6 hours onto a junk tape of TV from some channel to catch one show. But then they likely taped over that, again and again.
2. Tapes are bulky. VHS in general and junk tapes in particular would have been viewed by most people as low value junk that was tempting to disposed of. That's especially true during the decade or two before nostalgia and retro-cool starts making old junk more desirable.
3. Tapes degrade. Even if someone kept them, they might not be readable and/or gum up the VCR you're trying to use to read them.
4. VHS digitization equipment is also old. Apparently newer capture cards aren't very good compared to older ones, and there are specialized devices to fix signal errors (TBCs), allowing capture cards to actually work, that are becoming hard to find and expensive.
5. It takes a lot of time. VCRs play tapes at 1x speed. So if you want to digitize a 6 hour tape, it's going to take at least 6 hours.
But similarly, Amazon has never properly captured the experience of simply browsing the curated shelves of a bookstore or library. I don't think any online service has.
Then, most of these are missing. Archive.org's collection is thread-bare. For most calendar dates they only have one, and which market it is for is just random (though, it favors the big ones... California, NYC/NJ, etc).
After that, each page of listings is just bad. It's not as easily OCRed as more traditional multi-column magazines. The listings often don't make mention of which episode is being re-run, title only quite often. This affects afternoon cartoons on UHF quite a bit, since they'd do alot of the short film Looney Tunes and Woody Woodpecker. You don't get any information on pre-emption at all. No sports-going-in-to-overtime or President-Reagan-has-an-important-announcement-about-the-commies. Daytime soaps can probably be pieced together just from the date (but that isn't perfect over long stretches and mixups accumulate, the NY Times lost track of their issue number and by the time they noticed they were off by 5000).
Hell, I wonder how many different edited-for-tv edits of movies there are, for at least a few there might be more than one because there's more reasons to do it than just bleeping out profanity.
That must have been a pretty old or cheap TV. All the dial TVs I ever used had stops for all the channels, VHF and UHF. And even when I was a kid, pretty much all TVs didn't have dials, but some kind of digitally-controlled analog tuner.
I remember tuning from channel 2 to 60 or so in maybe about a quarter second or less. Definitely so fast I didn't really register it as a delay.
Kevin Harlan's voice sounds EXACTLY the same:
I don't think that's quite right.
IIRC that was basically a function to scan for inactive channels so they could be automatically skipped when flipping through channels sequentially. That scan was often automated.
The frequencies were already set in the TV, and I don't recall any capability on any set to change them (except to flip between the "over-the-air" channel/frequency mappings and the "cable" mappings).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/VHF_Usag...
2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, and UHF 30.
I also remember that depending on the radio, you could sometimes pick up the audio for I think VHF channel 6 at the low end of the FM dial.
Well, they weren't all old when I used them (some were; TVs were expensive to replace so got kept a while.) Maybe the ones without UHF stops were, though, its been quite a while.
> And even when I was a kid, pretty much all TVs didn't have dials
Likely, you were a kid more recently than I was.
One thing I realized about TikTok is how much it taps into the channel-flipping mechanism. It's basically what I would do as a kid rotating the dial, giving each beat about a second or two before flipping to the next.
The biggest difference is that today, it never comes back around the dial - the dial is practically infinite.
Netflix, for example, basically just pushes the same 10-20 movies and series at you under different headings.
At one time you could browse by categories like "classic TV" but those seem to be long gone.
Independence day which came out a year earlier (also with Will Smith) was a 12.
I know, though, that I had to adjust the antenna for some channels. The knob did have specific stops, but you had to tinker with the antenna position for some channels.
I used to watch regularly -- funny how I remembered the names of Colin Quinn and Kari Wuhrer, but couldn't remember the host's name without looking it up.
Ahem. In the 80s I remember struggling with a set my grandparents must have bought in the late 60s to try to watch TV. It was like holding a seance for sitcoms. I expect plenty of people were still watching TV in the 90s on sets sold in the 70s and 80s. Maybe not the majority, but I wouldn't assume "everyone" had the current goodness.
My teen complains about special effects in MCU shows sometimes. I'm like "I had to watch a bodybuilder painted green for superhero shows, and like it!" (RIP Bill Bixby...)
It doesn't quite show static the way the website does, but it's also not exactly what I'd call "near instantaneous."
And the TV analyzes your dial-flipping to determine what channel to change you to / generates a channel you are more likely to stay on.
https://my10stv better known as Youtube.com
https://my20stv better known as TikTok.com
There is no https://my40stv but there should be.
I think that effect might be exaggerated because he's tuning across several channels in one turn (e.g. https://youtu.be/ahtRI-_A1j8?t=88) and those channels would be full of static. The device he's showing apparently spaces out its transmissions 4 channels apart.
What I meant by "near instantaneous" was that the delays were short enough that I don't recall registering them as "I'm waiting for this," and when started I using digital TVs I registered the channel-switch speed as a noticeable and annoying regression.
I guess my point is the simulation has a digitally-slow pause with static, which seems like anachronism with a coat of retro-colored paint. I may have overstated things, because I mainly watched TV after the dial era (and the 90s were definitely after the dial era).
Maybe it's just weird confirmation bias but I felt like as soon as some of them start airing I'm like "yep... I remember seeing this." Whereas I don't feel that about much of the shows or newscasts. Maybe just shows how impressionable repetitive advertisements are on young minds.
or there are times where i'll get a clip from one angle then an hour later i get another video from a different perspective
Oh come off it. Sex still sells. Sexualized ads are still around, and they're always controversial. They were controversial in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and they're controversial today. If there was one thing Tipper Gore and Laura Bush agreed on during the 1990s, it was that media was too sexual and violent.
and ever since i have the ability to watch what i want any time because it's always available or i can download it, i do the same, but now i can choose when to watch without letting the TV dictate my schedule.
Also ones where the flyback transformer was dying, which would collapse the picture. But banging the TV would bring it back to life for 10-30 minutes. So we had a pile of shoes near the couch to throw at the TV as needed.
I have a small personal project of cataloging all the movies that played on television in the 90s. There are tons of television shows that are not only not available on DVD or VHS but also seemingly no one has it. Double goes for cartoons, tons just totally unavailable. It is sad.
It is pretty comprehensive and obviously it keeps the same market (NY). On your last point yeah the amazing thing is just how variable the length of movies are. Also just how many there were! Over 26 thousand unique films played on the 60ish channels in the New York Times in the 90s. Around 100 a day. Some films have like 40 votes on IMDb and played 20 times on television.
i can tell you that now i spend an average of 1 to 1.5 hours per day watching movies, series or youtube. there are to many other interesting things to do that i also want to spend time on (like discussing on HN :-)
There is something magical about switching to a channel mid-stream. The old joke about how you'll watch a movie from the half-way mark with commercials on TV even though the DVD is on the shelf. I think this is why pluto.tv is so popular.
I have a ton of video files but can't find any way to recreate this for myself. Why isn't there a project like Plex but for channels?
Hence shows were wiped in the past (since they could never be shown again) and even surviving shows can't be released without a lot of work.
Hook those up, record to DVD.
Rip DVD.
No need to fool with terrible capture cards they sucked back in the day and have not improved. The biggest problem I found with VHS is mold growth.
Edit: bonus with dvd recorders is that some have firewire ports so ripping portable video vamera tapes is automatic.
The "schedule" is JSON, so it was easy enough to write a web page that parses today's schedule and presents it TV-Guide style: https://engineersneedart.com/UHF/
(Gaps in airtime are filled with shorts of various kinds.)
It spans the vhs era, curated by hand to flip through different oddities and ephemera.
No tracking, no algorithms, just a stream of fun wierdness. It even has a TV guide type thing so you can pick when to tune in.
The worst is when the remote dies on you because somebody keeps forgetting to replace the batteries. So you have to sit a foot from the tv screen to manually flip the channels. Then you get yelled at by your parents because it's bad for your eyes. And now everybody, including your parents, is frying their eyes looking at a monitor or smartphone screen up close.
Reality competition shows are definitely a kind of game shows, but not all reality ahows are reality competition shows; MTV’s The Real World was not – nor was its loose inspiration, PBS’s An American Family. Expedition Robinson from 1997 (and the international version, Survivor, from 2000) really kicked off the reality competition format.
Loving this project btw, so much nostalgia
We and our other friends played almost every week for the next couple of years.
That early ‘90s commercial aesthetic is something else.
Any plans to publish this list? Would surely make a super interesting git repo for example...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_co...
If you want to see innovation in streaming you need the sort of legislation that prevents that tying. If every show was available on every streaming platform, then they would start to compete on offering the best streaming service and you'd start to see innovation. Right now, there's just no incentive.
If you message me privately I'd be happy to share the data. The git repos are:
https://github.com/patsmad/nyt-listings https://github.com/patsmad/nyt-listings-app
I use them for curation at the moment so the READMEs leave ... something to be desired. I hope by the end of August to have a read-only version up and running, although without a wikipedia-like effort I don't see how I would curate it fully so it'll probably always be a little touch and go as to what data is available.
The stats I have from curating are: 369345 individual movie "listing boxes" (I would guess around 98% accuracy, although if I were to field a guess the actual number there should be is probably 400K) of which 321308 are matched to a movie, and 296941 of those are for sure unique. And overall 202203 have channel + time + duration matched up using the VCR listings (which the New York Times conveniently published from around November 20th 1990, and the internet archive very nicely has the program the VCRs used to encode/decode those codes). There are 21530 unique movies at the moment.
If I understand the New York Times correctly, then none of this can be commercialized since I scraped the core data (the pages themselves) from the TimesMachine, so this really is a personal project, which I'm happy to share. I've made a few Letterboxd lists from the corresponding data, for example a series of lists with all of the movies (and play times) for films playing on September 1 in particular e.g. https://letterboxd.com/patsmad/list/television-films-septemb... It is rather consistent, around 100 films a day, for 1990-1999 it was 106, 118, 74, 74, 89, 99, 98, 110, 97, 93. As is obvious I can talk about this for days.
I'm not sure the best way to do private messages, my email is associated with this account, but I have no idea if you can see that. I usually just lurk on HN.
Broadcast-grade video tape cassettes were expensive even in bulk, and all tape requires climate-controlled archival storage since heat and especially humidity are quickly destructive to the adhesives that hold the magnetic layer to the substrate. (If you'd like more detail here, the term of art for this failure mode is "sticky-shed syndrome". While it's obviously more of a problem now than then, archival needs were understood at the time.)
Depending on format (Betacam SP or U-Matic), an open-ended commitment to preserving all programming would involve adding at minimum 2/3 to 1 cassette per hour of programming - more if you want multiple copies. So your running costs start out sizable and only grow over time, in search of a highly speculative payoff that at best won't be realized for years to decades.
I was a big Trekkie and watched Star Trek 2 from an over the air VHS recording. The commercial before it started was some cop/judge show, and a series premiere of a show starring Kristie Alley as a playboy bunny. As a kid who watched too much 80s TV, I remember alot of those promos, news blips and commercials! Another movie recording (Star Wars I think) had a news promo about the death of Kiki Camarena, a DEA agent murdered by a Mexican cartel. I probably watched that promo 100 times!
Hopefully our brain capacity doesn’t fill up. I have a lot of commercials up there in long term storage!
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/culture-magazines/1940s... https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=broadcast+television+in+the...
I went to see that with my older, cool as fuck aunty who went to university, shaved her head and had a CAR.
All of that was cool as fuck to me.
I felt so grown up going to see that! I was not sure if adults ate sweets (candy) at the pictures so I declined her offer only to see everyone get a stuff!
Ah the pressures of growing up. Spend half your life desperate to be grown and the other half wishing you weren’t!
Sally later confided to me that no adult would go with her to see Batman. Comic book movies except Superman were very much not for ‘adults’ in late eighties Liverpool !
There is at least 100 different films from every year from 1931 to 1999 it looks like (obviously many more from the 80s and 90s). But even just considering that, that's 7K as an absolute minimum. With straight-to-video and TV films the 90s peaked with ~850 unique films from 1995 alone playing on television. And to just give an idea of the level of obscurity, the median IMDb vote count for 1995 is 500, so half are on the level of something like https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122968/ (which yes, played 7 times, mostly on TMC in March of 1996). Also once you get very obscure things get all muddled. Like with https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112363/ which is marked as 1995 but certainly appears to have played once on television in 1991 so IMDb is wrong in this case. And of course there are a number of mistakes due to titles matching which I'm slowly correcting.
There are some caveats. This guy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0222755/, played 6 times, but on channel 41 (which at the time was Spanish language maybe?), so it has 0 votes on IMDb, but played 6 times on television, which is odd but not unheard of. But you do have to consider that this is using a slightly larger range of channels (some specific to the New York region, like CUNY and MSG) than one might expect. I would guess though that maybe 40% of films play on TCM, SHO, MAX, or HBO ultimately though. Most channels didn't play movies ever outside of primetime.
I am unfortunately not notified when people respond, which is why I'm late to responding ;)
Please feel free to reach out to my burner e-mail hideitall@gmail.com and I will give you my preferred address.
