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The first telly I remember was b/w and had three channels and belonged to a neighbour. Provided the dog hadn't recently wazzed on the rubber plant that support

The first telly I remember was b/w and had three channels and belonged to a neighbour. Provided the dog hadn't recently wazzed on the rubber plant that supported the aerial, in which case ITV was optional and then we only had BBC One and Two. However, old school CRT screens could handle pans and zooms that my modern LG thing can only dream of. Then again the thing I'm watching now is comparatively huge and "waffer theeeen". A ~50" CRT would stick out from the wall about four feet and weigh enough that I'd be using some of the more robust Civil Engineering things I learned at college to fix it to the wall. When I was a child it took a while to tune a TV by hand, channel by channel. Remember portables with the little aerials on the end of a wire? Then finding out that to watch the rugby today involved perching the TV on a chair near a window and the aerial held by long suffering (someone) holding it at a strange angle near the ceiling. You missed half the match faffing around. My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s. I recall getting an Epsom FX80 dot matrix printer connected to our C-64 was quite traumatic and involved getting a Centronics (parallel) interface card made up and stuff. I still have the C-64 and it now has a USB interface. Now I press the home button and pick a service on my TV. OK on my TV that isn't one of my RPi driven monsters that uses the MythTV backend. I have an Octo-LNB on my sat dish ... (Sorry about this (twitch) but it's iPlayer and you were a child, not a kid)

dave_sid 6y ago
Nah I was a kid and we had a colour tv. Your setup sounds very impressive but you’re not the average viewer, and it’s the average viewer that has an old fire stick like mine that takes 30s to load the iplayer app.
- iainmerrick 6y ago
  I assume you’re in the UK if you’re using iPlayer. Why not just use Freeview? It’s not quite as fast as analogue TV because it has to acquire and decode the digital signal, but apart from that it’s just as convenient, the quality is better and there are many more channels.
bscphil 6y ago
> My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s. Not to be too much of a Linux-using stereotype, but it really does seem like the things that have been getting better are those things that are made (usually for free) for users for the benefit of themselves and other users, and not by profit-seeking corporations as closed-source software. The few exceptions to that rule are those areas that are heavily dependent on technological improvements, e.g. music production, gaming, media editing. But that's just because there are still huge profit-wins to be had just by improving the quality of what the user receives. There's no reason to think wins like that won't dry up.

dave_sid 6y ago

Nah I was a kid and we had a colour tv. Your setup sounds very impressive but you’re not the average viewer, and it’s the average viewer that has an old fire stick like mine that takes 30s to load the iplayer app.

iainmerrick 6y ago
I assume you’re in the UK if you’re using iPlayer. Why not just use Freeview? It’s not quite as fast as analogue TV because it has to acquire and decode the digital signal, but apart from that it’s just as convenient, the quality is better and there are many more channels.

bscphil 6y ago

> My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s. Not to be too much of a Linux-using stereotype, but it really does seem like the things that have been getting better are those things that are made (usually for free) for users for the benefit of themselves and other users, and not by profit-seeking corporations as closed-source software. The few exceptions to that rule are those areas that are heavily dependent on technological improvements, e.g. music production, gaming, media editing. But that's just because there are still huge profit-wins to be had just by improving the quality of what the user receives. There's no reason to think wins like that won't dry up.