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Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

Powered Descent posted:

I knew it as "VCR Plus+". (Jokes about whether you pronounced both pluses may or may not have been made in C++ programming class.)

But there was no way to use those codes to tell the VCR to keep recording an extra hour or so after the scheduled end of the show you wanted. That was necessary if there was a sporting event on before it, since those always seemed to run long and delay the entire rest of the lineup for that evening.

Yeah, I think my parents used it like 3 times before going back to their normal, record the 5 minutes before and after the scheduled time.

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tribbledirigible
Jul 27, 2004
I finally beat the internet. The end boss was hard.

Collateral Damage posted:

Speaking of remotes and programming, Panasonic released a series of VCRs in the late 80s where the remote had a barcode reader. For programming scheduled recordings you'd just take out your handy sheet of barcodes and swipe the reader over them.

I'll just let the hands do the talking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqs3kMW1caA

I guess some marketing exec at Panasonic really really liked that scene in Labyrinth.

Cojawfee
May 31, 2006
I think the US is dumb for not using Celsius

The_Franz posted:

Networks are contractually obligated to air games to completion, at least in their home markets, after they cut a game short in 1968 to air the movie Heidi, which resulted in such a massive tidal wave of angry phone calls that NBC's switchboard blew. Even when they decided to put the game back on, they couldn't call the control room to make the switch because there were no available phone circuits.

That's dumb as poo poo. A football game lasts for 60 minutes, if they want to do a bunch of time outs and commercials that makes it run longer, people should have to tune back in later to see the rest.

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

Cojawfee posted:

That's dumb as poo poo. A football game lasts for 60 minutes, if they want to do a bunch of time outs and commercials that makes it run longer, people should have to tune back in later to see the rest.

:lol: you've never met a football fan have you?

ishikabibble
Jan 21, 2012

The_Franz posted:

Networks are contractually obligated to air games to completion, at least in their home markets, after they cut a game short in 1968 to air the movie Heidi, which resulted in such a massive tidal wave of angry phone calls that NBC's switchboard blew. Even when they decided to put the game back on, they couldn't call the control room to make the switch because there were no available phone circuits.

You're forgetting that the 'Heidi Game' was also really famous because the losing team managed to come back and win in the last minute of the game, after they'd already cut away. So they had to awkwardly display the final score during the movie and basically tell everyone they hosed up and didn't air a really heroic comeback.

RC and Moon Pie
May 5, 2011

Our first family VCR was a General Electric. It recorded like normal, but there was something weird the way it registered time. If you were two hours into a tape, it didn't display that, but a different number.



I think they were called tracking numbers. The 1290 on the right side is the tracking number. I don't know if it was cumulative seconds elapsed on the tape or if it had no scientific basis at all. It was a gigantic pain and Dad meticulously labeled his tapes so he could find what he wanted. You could also program the VCR via a front panel that opened up and it had all kinds of little switches.

taqueso
Mar 8, 2004


:911:
:wookie: :thermidor: :wookie:
:dehumanize:

:pirate::hf::tinfoil:
I think it's just seconds since you reset the counter, but I was pretty young when we had a vcr with that feature. Numbers that count up are inherently cool to a kid though

Lurking Haro
Oct 27, 2009

RC and Moon Pie posted:

Our first family VCR was a General Electric. It recorded like normal, but there was something weird the way it registered time. If you were two hours into a tape, it didn't display that, but a different number.



I think they were called tracking numbers. The 1290 on the right side is the tracking number. I don't know if it was cumulative seconds elapsed on the tape or if it had no scientific basis at all. It was a gigantic pain and Dad meticulously labeled his tapes so he could find what he wanted. You could also program the VCR via a front panel that opened up and it had all kinds of little switches.

It might be a tape counter.

Horace
Apr 17, 2007

Gone Skiin'

taqueso posted:

I think it's just seconds since you reset the counter, but I was pretty young when we had a vcr with that feature. Numbers that count up are inherently cool to a kid though

...as are vacuum fluorescent displays. What kid didn't shine a light into the VCR or stereo display to see all the elements which weren't used on your machine?

Guy Axlerod
Dec 29, 2008
Remember when TBS or WGN or some station used to start all their shows at :05 or :35? I never had anything worth taping on that channel, but I remember having to watch 5 minutes of some crap show before whatever I wanted to actually watch came on. They might have been good, but I probably thought they were crap because I only saw the end credits and commercials.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

On a related note, half the charm of watching Qi from outside the UK though entirely legal offline backups is that little five-second glimpse into a parallel universe that you get when the video includes a few seconds past the credits.

"And now, another brain teaser as Brian is once again deep in it in Up Your Down Hat, followed by the dark mysteries of The Other Manor".

British TV sounds absurd when all you hear are the titles and blurbs - and it feels like it's never the same show twice.

Computer viking has a new favorite as of 23:12 on Aug 13, 2020

Trabant
Nov 26, 2011

All systems nominal.

Computer viking posted:

"And now, another brain teaser as Brian is once again deep in it in Up Your Down Hat, followed by the dark mysteries of The Other Manor".

"On Dave"

Huh? Who's Dave?

legooolas
Jul 30, 2004

Powered Descent posted:

But there was no way to use those codes to tell the VCR to keep recording an extra hour or so after the scheduled end of the show you wanted.

At least in the UK there was, via PDC : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_Delivery_Control
..which worked with those Videoplus codes. Not sure about other countries, or how well it actually worked in practice, but it was supposed to solve that exact problem.

Collateral Damage
Jun 13, 2009

evobatman posted:

Wasn't that ShowView codes in Europe?
Yep. A very short lived thing.

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


taqueso posted:

I think it's just seconds since you reset the counter, but I was pretty young when we had a vcr with that feature. Numbers that count up are inherently cool to a kid though

Also perfect for returning the porno tape you found back to it's exact position your dad had it at so didn't know you been snooping for xmas presents.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

Humphreys posted:

the porno tape

Oh you mean the "Finland-Sweden cross-country skiing final 1987" tape?

90s Solo Cup
Feb 22, 2011

To understand the cup
He must become the cup



:hmmyes:

Horace posted:

...as are vacuum fluorescent displays. What kid didn't shine a light into the VCR or stereo display to see all the elements which weren't used on your machine?

Gotta admit the VFD on the first family VCR I can remember was nowhere near as snazzy as that GE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiS0at1RrYY

Wasn't even sure it was the right one until I heard that loading mechanism @ 22:49. Now I can put a name to that distinct sound ingrained in my early childhood.

spookygonk
Apr 3, 2005
Does not give a damn

First family VCR, rented (as was the TV) and dig that wired remote control!

LifeSunDeath
Jan 4, 2007

still gay rights and smoke weed every day

spookygonk posted:

First family VCR, rented (as was the TV) and dig that wired remote control!



reminded me of our old wooden cabinet TV with the very clacky channel knob...if you ripped through a few channels at once it felt like it was going to break.

not mine, but ours was very similar

Johnny Aztec
Jan 30, 2005

by Hand Knit


Woweee! 100 whole hours?!

Rap Game Goku
Apr 2, 2008

Word to your moms, I came to drop spirit bombs


Johnny Aztec posted:



Woweee! 100 whole hours?!

It was harder to spend all day online when you had to dial in and got kicked off if someone picked up the phone.

RC and Moon Pie
May 5, 2011

LifeSunDeath posted:

reminded me of our old wooden cabinet TV with the very clacky channel knob...if you ripped through a few channels at once it felt like it was going to break.

not mine, but ours was very similar

My grandparents console lasted so long that the power button quick working.They plugged it into a switch and turned it on that way. It was still going when everything went to digital, probably a 30-year lifespan.

Killingyouguy!
Sep 8, 2014

Growing up, my Nintendos, all the way up to the GameCube, connected to a wood panel knob TV via vcr. The TV eventually smeared red all over the screen then would only display the colour green, but it lasted a very long time and gave my gaming setup some serious aesthetic.

The vcr still functions as the console hub and even had its heads repaired so it can play tapes again! It's just connected to a different crt.

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

RC and Moon Pie posted:

My grandparents console lasted so long that the power button quick working.They plugged it into a switch and turned it on that way. It was still going when everything went to digital, probably a 30-year lifespan.

One of your ancestors should have been an electrical engineer. They weren't a sweet wood console, but we did have two TVs where the power button broke, and my dad the EE just replaced it with a switch, looked weird but it worked. We definitely kept those TVs until we moved out of that house in the early 00's

Cojawfee
May 31, 2006
I think the US is dumb for not using Celsius
Oh man, the day I discovered that our console TV had a little door on it with knobs inside that let me mess with the colors.

RoyKeen
Jul 24, 2007

Grimey Drawer

Cojawfee posted:

Oh man, the day I discovered that our console TV had a little door on it with knobs inside that let me mess with the colors.

And the horizontal and vertical.

Has UHF channels been mentioned? There were the regular 11 or so channels but the UHF knob had dozens. Mostly static. Here in NY there was maybe another PBS station and a couple of Spanish ones. It was this magical other world. Like going to the Nether.

RoyKeen has a new favorite as of 21:45 on Aug 14, 2020

Trabant
Nov 26, 2011

All systems nominal.

The Ape of Naples posted:

And the horizontal and vertical.

You stay on your side of the outer limits, Ape :argh:

Cojawfee
May 31, 2006
I think the US is dumb for not using Celsius

The Ape of Naples posted:

And the horizontal and vertical.

Has UHF channels been mentioned? There were the regular 11 or so channels but the UHF knob had dozens. Mostly static. Here in NY there was maybe another PBS station and a couple of Spanish ones. It was this magical other world. Like going to the Nether.

I had my own TV in my room for my Nintendo that had a VHF and UHF dial. A quick glance at wikipedia says that UHF didn't really take off because older sets didn't have the UHF dial, so people wouldn't be getting these UHF channels until they decided to upgrade their TV. Considering how expensive TVs were then, people probably weren't likely to upgrade their TVs that often. Because of that, stations weren't really interested in the UHF licenses. By the time I got this TV, it was really old. I think it was my aunt's old TV. Old enough that I had to use a RCA to RF to antenna adapter to plug my N64 into it.

KozmoNaut
Apr 23, 2008

Happiness is a warm
Turbo Plasma Rifle


The Ape of Naples posted:

And the horizontal and vertical.

Reminded me of this. Peak of British comedy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7-Wzvh2B-w&t=240s

Space Gopher
Jul 31, 2006

BLITHERING IDIOT AND HARDCORE DURIAN APOLOGIST. LET ME TELL YOU WHY THIS SHIT DON'T STINK EVEN THOUGH WE ALL KNOW IT DOES BECAUSE I'M SUPER CULTURED.

Cojawfee posted:

I had my own TV in my room for my Nintendo that had a VHF and UHF dial. A quick glance at wikipedia says that UHF didn't really take off because older sets didn't have the UHF dial, so people wouldn't be getting these UHF channels until they decided to upgrade their TV. Considering how expensive TVs were then, people probably weren't likely to upgrade their TVs that often. Because of that, stations weren't really interested in the UHF licenses. By the time I got this TV, it was really old. I think it was my aunt's old TV. Old enough that I had to use a RCA to RF to antenna adapter to plug my N64 into it.

By the late 80s to early 90s, most people had a TV that could receive UHF. But, the signal itself has some less-desirable properties - it falls off much quicker than VHF when there isn't line of sight from the transmitter to the receiver, and it's generally more susceptible to noise that shows up as static. You can get away with a smaller antenna on UHF, but overall quality usually turned out worse. So, the big-money network affiliate TV stations stayed on VHF channels, and UHF was relegated to weird local stations, religious broadcasters, and so forth.

These days, almost all over-the-air TV is UHF. The channel numbers you see on the TV don't have any relationship to the frequency any more; part of the HDTV standard included a way for stations to present a channel number that matched their old VHF frequency (CBS Channel 4, your home for Local Sports Team) even when they moved the actual signal to channel 37 or something.

Computer viking
May 30, 2011
Now with less breakage.

Norway only had a few analog channels, but still used UHF without much fanfare - the intensely 80s Phillips my parents used until they bought an early LCD to save some space certainly had no problems with it.

This may be another of those second mover things, where being the first adopter comes with a risk of being stuck with an older system - Norway was not a great early adopter of TV, especially not in color.

(Quoth Einar Førde, a Norwegian politician and later chief of broadcasting, and a man of a distinct and conservative dialect: "Sin may have arrived on earth, but we don't want it in color")

Guy Axlerod
Dec 29, 2008
We had Fox and PBS on UHF. They both had clever call signs that made no sense on cable. Fox was WUHF. PBS was WXXI on 21 on antenna, but 11 on cable. I guess XI is still 11.

Pham Nuwen
Oct 30, 2010



Cojawfee posted:

I had my own TV in my room for my Nintendo that had a VHF and UHF dial. A quick glance at wikipedia says that UHF didn't really take off because older sets didn't have the UHF dial, so people wouldn't be getting these UHF channels until they decided to upgrade their TV. Considering how expensive TVs were then, people probably weren't likely to upgrade their TVs that often. Because of that, stations weren't really interested in the UHF licenses. By the time I got this TV, it was really old. I think it was my aunt's old TV. Old enough that I had to use a RCA to RF to antenna adapter to plug my N64 into it.

I have a little old black and white TV from the 70s and even it has a UHF dial. I got it at a thrift store and somebody had installed a little after-market board to take direct composite video input (originally for a computer)... so I hacked in RCA audio input too and now presumably have one of the only mid-70s TVs with full RCA audio/video input.

Pretty good
Apr 16, 2007



KozmoNaut posted:

Reminded me of this. Peak of British comedy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7-Wzvh2B-w&t=240s
Kind of a derail but lmao holy poo poo. My family had this in our VHS collection when I was a kid and my brother showed it to me when I was... five or six? Way, way too loving young. But I still loved it and rewatched it constantly for the next few years, and now whenever he and I get together and have a few beers we inevitably end up quoting it at each other, 25 years later.

I think the only reason we were allowed to watch it was that our parents were nostalgic for The Young Ones and figured this was basically just more of the same, if they had bothered sticking around and checking it out for more than thirty seconds that tape would've gone straight in the bin :v:

Flying zebras! Look at them go!

Humphreys
Jan 26, 2013

We conceived a way to use my mother as a porn mule


KozmoNaut posted:

Reminded me of this. Peak of British comedy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7-Wzvh2B-w&t=240s

I love Dangervision!

Always reminds me of Leo Wanker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpmyw2ZDRfo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqGNgE1mr8k

LifeSunDeath
Jan 4, 2007

still gay rights and smoke weed every day

Sad he had to wear boomerang-face to make it into the american market.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Space Gopher posted:

By the late 80s to early 90s, most people had a TV that could receive UHF. But, the signal itself has some less-desirable properties - it falls off much quicker than VHF when there isn't line of sight from the transmitter to the receiver, and it's generally more susceptible to noise that shows up as static. You can get away with a smaller antenna on UHF, but overall quality usually turned out worse. So, the big-money network affiliate TV stations stayed on VHF channels, and UHF was relegated to weird local stations, religious broadcasters, and so forth.
In the '70s and '80s if you wanted to spend all Saturday watching kung fu and monster movies on TV, UHF was where it was at. In Houston at the time there were two UHF stations, channel 26 and channel 39, and on a good weekend you could catch a horribly dubbed version of Five Deadly Venoms (1978) about eight times between Friday night and Monday morning. One time in the late '80s I was stuck in bed in east Texas with a fever and a malfunctioning AC, and the only TV station I could get any reception on was a local UHF channel playing Behave Yourself! (1951), a dreadful romantic comedy about gangsters chasing a dog, on endless loop. I still hear its theme song in my nightmares.

Lowen SoDium
Jun 5, 2003

Highen Fiber
Clapping Larry
I worked at a UHF station in the mid-late 90's. My dad actually worked there years before I did (unrelated to my employment. no overlap). It was more or less the station from Weird Al's UHF movie when he worked there, complete with locally produced variety/comedy shows late at night. Then they became a FOX affiliate which honestly didn't improve the quality of the station that much.

Jestery
Aug 2, 2016

Eat a dick unicycle boy!
I have identified some very specific black holes in my mental conception of math. Things where I will mentally perform an operation or I have to convert a fraction into a decimal. I have a bunch of mental heuristics that I want to erase and have a more concrete conception.

Enter

The N-902 ES simplex trig slide rule




I'm a very "physical" person, always using my hands and seeing how things move and relate

Eg

I always have enjoyed building model planes and the like

I'm interpreter level competent in sign language

Doing perspective based art

etc etc

My hope is that by spending a few afternoons working through some high school math problems , having the my slide rule round the house for random nerd-snipe style math problems I'll have to slow down my mental processes and utilise my manual learning tendencies I will fix these problems. As well as learning an entirely useless skill in 2020

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ynohtna
Feb 16, 2007

backwoods compatible
Illegal Hen
I still keep a slide rule on my desk, although I don't think I can remember how to use it properly. The tangible, interaction of the numeric relationships really appeal to me.

If you like the slide rule, you should look into getting some Vernier calipers to aid in the model plane building and perspective art.

BTW:

Jestery posted:

I'm interpreter level competent in sign language

You own for this.

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