Watch TV from the 90s and earlier

In my experience, it was fairly common for there to be (as an example) a channel 3 and a channel 5 but no 4, so if you were flipping through the channels on certain TV's you'd see static.

It was also a common experience for those of us who didn't have cable or satellite, with the only channels available being whatever came in over the air.

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.

Except here, there is static before the content appears on the channel. Which is not the same as stumbling upon an empty channel.

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.

Yes, in broadcast (over the air) TV, only every other channel was allocated in a given area. That's why most devices that connected to a TV (computers, VCRs, etc.) could use either channel 3 or channel 4 because one of the two would be unused.

By the 90s everyone in the Northerhn hemisphere got a decent TV with instant tuning. Once you tuned the channel and set it up to a button on the remote or the TV front panel, things went as fast as Linux switching TTY's todays. No joke.

There were some exceptions, though, as the VHF TV channels aren't all contiguous. In North America, there's a gap between channels 4 and 5; and channels 6 and 7 are separated by the bands for several radio services (FM, aviation, amateur, and marine).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/VHF_Usag...

Hm, didn't know that. But I still remember the channels we had when I was a kid:

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.

Yep, that was a thing with NTSC-M analog channel 6, which had the audio at 87.75MHz, just below the nominal bottom of the FM range at 88.1MHz. I used to listen to the 10 o'clock news that way.

Yes, I remember well when in 1990 they went door to door handing out brand new TVs...

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.

ISTR we had 2,4,5,9,11, and 30 (UHF). Channels 2-5 were ABC, CBS, and NBC. Channel 9 was PBS, and 11 and 30 were local stations that weren't affiliated with any of the major networks.

Even my grandma's TV from the 80's had instant buttons to switch between channels but no TV remote. And, yet, the tuning was on the spot. No delays. Zero. Literally.