To answer Bruce's question: Yes, they still make console TV's.
We moved to a rural area in 1969, and always had only local television. I still live in a local area and still receive local programming via off-air antenna with rotor, supplemented by a B.U.D. satellite dish. I remember us having a huge B&W console television with AM/FM stereo and turntable built in. We later had a color set built the same way and both of these were before solid state. I also remember the search for out-of-state channels when the atmosphere was just right, usually at night, watching through the snowy screen just to see something new and foreign to us.
Luckily we lived kind of in-between Indianapolis, Terra Haute, and Lafayette and could pick up a few independent stations as well as ABC, NBC, and CBS stations. The independents would continue with normal programming when the prez was on. I remember we got a PBS station in 1970 and watched Sesame Street a lot, back when it was a lot better.

Do you know what else I just remembered? For the do it yourself Mr. fix it Dads, a lot of drugstores and hardware stores in the 60

I still have no cable & i still have a TV in the dinning room that was our old late 70s family TV & yes it has no remote.  It is the only TV in the house that my field sequential 3D movies will work on, all that plasma, widescreen & rear projection is useless & the 3D won't work. I'd prefere an old picture tube TV from the mid 90s any day over all that over rated plasma, widescreen & rear projection crap anyway. It's funny how those old appliances are built to last & won't die compared the ones now that always seem to die just after the warantee runs out. We have a refridgerator in the garage that my parents bought in the early 70s when they got married & you know what, it's still running, you'd never see a refridgerator from this decade last more than 30 years that's for sure.

Fun topic!  ;D 

I lived in a rural area in the 70's.  I have no idea whether cable TV was even available where we lived, but I suspect no.  We were so far from a city, the signal was always weak.  Translate REAL SNOWY.  :P  Besides that we had junky TVs (although we always had several).  Mostly all black and white, never with a remote control.  The vertical hold problem, "flipping", is a very familiar memory...

Anyone else stick tin foil on the antenna to bring in the picture?  ;D



We used tin foil, hangers (because the rabbit ears were broken) and just about anything else we could think of. We had this old B&W that had definately seen better days. The channel knobs were all broken (we had to change channels with plyers-but there weren't too many channels to chose from so it wasn't too much) and the on/off knob had broken off so we had to plug it in to turn it on and unplug it to turn it off. We were all happen when our grandmother gave us her t.v. which was COLOR!!!  :o




Cat

As far as I could remember, my parents always had color TV's, but I also remember getting an old 60's Philco black-and-white TV as a hand-me-down from my older sister. I could hardly ever get any signal in, and I think we threw it in the city dump after only a couple of years due to its obsolesence.
  The first time I ever saw a remote was at an uncle's house up in Bismarck, N.D. in the late 70's. I remember thinking it was the coolest thing when I was a kid, but this particular uncle was a little on the crusty side and wasn't about to give up his remote, so I didn't get to mess around with it much. I remember that the TV was a Sylvania console, and what I thought was so neat about the remote was that the tuner wasn't a digital readout--it was an old-style dial tuner. The remote had + and - symbols for the channels  (as well as volume and mute), and when you held the channel button down it would automatically turn the dial, making this "CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK" sound as it flipped through the channels.

We didn't get color until probably the very early 70's. I remember the first color set we had was an RCA(in fact all my parent's sets were RCA). It was a console that had louvred doors which slid into pockets along the sides of the screen. When the TV wasn't in use, the doors would cover the screen. That set lasted into the early 80's. The parents still have the set that replaced it.
I know what you mean about todays junkey TV's. I bought a Zenith in the late 90's, it lasted less than 5 years. Something simple went wrong with it that cost $14.00 in parts & $20.00 in labor to repair, but I had to pay $75.00 to send it to the shop. It lasted 5 months and the same thing crapped out. I thinked they fixed the symptom & not the problem. I now have an RCA just like the folks.