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Was that a Nick thing? I remember hearing about something like that in the UK but I don't have specific memories of it in the US. Thinking about early 90s Nick just gave me a mad nostalgia rush though. Relevant tech thing: the Are You Afraid of the Dark "FMV" adventure game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGDmYHak7zY
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# ? Feb 10, 2025 10:49 |
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Fart Sandwiches posted:what was that show on Nickelodeon where kids would be put into Sonic and have to grab rings and they always sucked rear end? like the kid was on a green screen and they used some tech to make it work with Sonic gently caress, same
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not tech poo poo but SNick. Saturday night Nickelodeon was my jam as a kid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNICK the internet truly does contain all information. according to that article I was watching snick in the 92-early 96 era because I don’t remember a show called space cases
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SNICK was the coolest poo poo in the 90s. Me and my friends would make an event of watching it when we were like 7-8ish. It was a bit of marketing wizardry to make that feel edgy and cool alongside selling Mattel toys or whatever.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Arcade
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shoeberto posted:SNICK was the coolest poo poo in the 90s. Me and my friends would make an event of watching it when we were like 7-8ish. It was a bit of marketing wizardry to make that feel edgy and cool alongside selling Mattel toys or whatever. can confirm. just as i was approaching an age that was too old for nickelodeon, they were like 'these shows are for mature young adults only!' and it completely worked
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:not tech poo poo but SNick. Saturday night Nickelodeon was my jam as a kid i remember that show
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thank you! https://youtu.be/nSCFlafbXBs I remember them being name brand games but lmao that looks so fun still even though they had to keep looking at the monitors to see what was around
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Theres a documentary called The Orange Years about the heyday of Nickelodeon and they had a whole segment of it on Nick Arcade, with a pic of the blue screen set for the final challenge Considering the kids were playing the game essentially blindly, I take back absolutely everything 12 year old me yelled at the TV when the kids were flailing around and whiffing it during the final round
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when i was a kid, late 80s/early 90s i used to love watching nick at nite when I’d stay overnight with my grandma. we didn’t have cable at home so it was a real treat and she approved of the old shows.
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in my teen years town the churches lobbied the cable company to get rid of that horrible perverted MTV and so we only had VH1 on the local cable system. not even joking
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President Beep posted:when i was a kid, late 80s/early 90s i used to love watching nick at nite when I’d stay overnight with my grandma. we didn’t have cable at home so it was a real treat and she approved of the old shows. when I was probably nine years old, I would wake up on Friday mornings gleeful with the knowledge that Friday night meant Get Smart was airing on Nick at Nite
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honestly it was probably a mistake on the boomers' part to let a lot of us get a ton of our culture from 13" tv's tuned to UHF stations. delightfully weird i still remember the original live run of DS9
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when I was a kid my dad pirated the gently caress out of cable. he got some descrambler box from a guy at work and we had all the cable channels and it ruled. this was the mid 80’s in the UP so having cable was pretty rare and pirating was “hack the planet” level poo poo I can still remember how to tune to Disney on our ancient 80’s cable box. left side rotating switch in the middle, button 32 ![]()
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absolutely 100% man, jerrold. that and scientific atlanta are two brand names that instantly scream <we bout to get some free pay TV> but now they're super dead
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i think the last real echo of the tv pirate wars was directv hacking, with the measures vs countermeasures war between the pirates and the vendors
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Jonny 290 posted:i think the last real echo of the tv pirate wars was directv hacking, with the measures vs countermeasures war between the pirates and the vendors is there a documentary on this or something? I'm a bit too young to remember all of this
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I really wanted to get into the direct tv stuff back when you could, but I was too broke for the equipment at the time. nowadays scientific Atlanta may as well be the goodwill house brand for how much of their stuff I see there lol
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c-band TVRO dishes
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we were able to get more than a couple of channels once digital satellites took off in the 2000s. we lived too far out to get cable unless the cable company said we paid for at least a full mile of cable and installation all on our own i remember being mildly jealous as a kid about nickelodeon
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i can still remember having access to three ota channels. cable blew my mind.
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i also grew up on a dirt road with a party line
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I vaguely remember phone numbers being listed like “kl5-1234”. I feel like it was out of fashion for sure but some very old signage still had it listed. I had heard of party lines but we never had one.
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my road was at least tar, which suuuuuucked in the summer
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Jonny 290 posted:i think the last real echo of the tv pirate wars was directv hacking, with the measures vs countermeasures war between the pirates and the vendors how hard is it these days to broadcast OTA TV yourself? I have to imagine that high end SDR’s have the capability? I do miss the days when it was possible for someone to just hijack the airwaves and broadcast weird poo poo
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:I vaguely remember phone numbers being listed like “kl5-1234”. I feel like it was out of fashion for sure but some very old signage still had it listed. drat, that old phone number system predates my living memory for sure. nearby where i grew up there used to be an old abandoned billboard with the kl5 exchange number thing on it. looked like some real 1950s poo poo.
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:how hard is it these days to broadcast OTA TV yourself? I have to imagine that high end SDR’s have the capability? https://www.hackster.io/news/broadcast-your-favorite-tv-show-24-7-with-a-raspberry-pi-4ec9c7f8fe8e
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This YouTube channel is doing a comprehensive history of Nickelodeon (with at least one episode for every show they had ever aired), starting with its predecessor in the children's entertainment channel on the experimental interactive Qube cable system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ6Yg9Wvt4s Honestly, even if you don't care about Nick this first episode is worth watching just to learn about how ambitious cable companies could be in the 70s before they had fully figured out what people wanted from cable and what was and was not profitable.
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President Beep posted:drat, that old phone number system predates my living memory for sure. nearby where i grew up there used to be an old abandoned billboard with the kl5 exchange number thing on it. looked like some real 1950s poo poo. all number calling became the standard in the 60s. the names were mnemonics for the switch. i want to go to the telephone museum, where they have all sorts of neato switching equipment, but oh well covid.
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the lucent coffee mug stain logo
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when a coworker claimed that halo 3 was going to be the last halo game he later went to be a PM at microsoft and IIRC is still there
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:I had heard of party lines but we never had one. we had a party line up at my grandpa's cabin. there was only one other person still on the line (theresa). our ring was two short, hers was one long. if you placed a long-distance call, you'd get an operator asking who was calling so they could bill it properly.
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ADINSX posted:is there a documentary on this or something? I'm a bit too young to remember all of this The Black Sunday kill was pretty epic https://blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-the-black-sunday-hack/
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Jonny 290 posted:in my teen years town the churches lobbied the cable company to get rid of that horrible perverted MTV and so we only had VH1 on the local cable system. not even joking this is why when I lived in Missississippi I was willing to deal with a 45min commute to work while living in a college town at least Oxford didn’t do that poo poo
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kitten smoothie posted:Theres a documentary called The Orange Years about the heyday of Nickelodeon and they had a whole segment of it on Nick Arcade, with a pic of the blue screen set for the final challenge imagine a reboot with vr goggles for the players so they saw a somewhat representative view of the 2d game. that poo poo would be a hit show all over again. i don't care that we can build real sets like that, i want to see those video game graphics ![]() President Beep posted:i can still remember having access to three ota channels. cable blew my mind. we had 5 when i was a kid and, as i got older, i started making increasingly dubious wire sculpture-esque antennas on our old tv and picking up some fainter channels from neighboring regions. sometimes i'd get a bounce from across lake erie and pull in a shopping channel from ontario. it was likely (looking it up now) from london, on as a rebroadcast from toronto, so i got to see some other major city's car commercials and filler programming
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When I was little there were two channels, and the only time commercials were on was during the evening slot MTV (Mainostelevisio, lit. "Adverisement television") had on channel 2 (or network 2 as it was called). They also had all the good movies and series.
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we had cable growing up, but it was the cheapest package. it was always really exciting to go to my grandparents house in another state because their basic cable package had the disney channel actually it was exciting for other reasons but maybe getting to watch an episode of rescue rangers was pretty cool too i guess
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:when I was a kid my dad pirated the gently caress out of cable. i remember discovering what the left side switch on this thing did when i was six years old and it blowing my mind that we had more than twelve channels.
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Achmed Jones posted:we had cable growing up, but it was the cheapest package. it was always really exciting to go to my grandparents house in another state because their basic cable package had the disney channel oh man, disney channel. only the select few kids had that.
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# ? Feb 10, 2025 10:49 |
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yeah it was always weird to go to a friend's house and they had 80 channels including disney and hbo and all the pay ones
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