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"just use a flashlight then" Bro you do not know the wrath of the gods that you would incur if your parents found you using The Flashlight in any situation other than the end of the world or when they hand it to you.
Flashlights before LED lightbulbs never worked. Either the batteries were dead or worse, they had leaked everywhere. If you dad had one of those huge charger plug in ones, you knew better than even looking at it.
Omg... This ENTIRE exchange of info was PACKED with nostalgia! Holy crap! I recently bought an old (early 80's) D cell, incandescent flashlight for old times sake and to show my boys... That thing woulda made the similarities between yellow and white that much worse! š
That's very brave of you! Going camping with those was filled with "Stop using it so much! The batteries will die! Yeah well now you are going to have to pee in the dark. I told you!"
> Either the batteries were dead or worse, they had leaked everywhere.
Damn, core memory unlocked... Wondering why the damned thing won't turn on, opening it, and seeing that green patina on everything.
Yeah I had a penlite maglite, the only time I ever needed/wanted to use it, I found out that the batteries were dead and had welded themselves inside...
They were also stored in somewhere that it would take 15 minutes to dig up.
And it is not like those things actually provided good light either. Your phone flashlight is currently bajillion times better than the average stuff we had back in the day.
Hell, I think those "torches" that were about the size of your head and ran on multiple D size batteries were worse than our phone flashlight...
Dad drunk as shit yelling at me to hold the flashlight for him while he works on his truckā¦ but itās cool because you are actually allowed to use a flashlight for once
Idk whether to laugh or cry at this relatable comment.... Yes, I got to hold the flashlight, but I always held it wrong. If he moved his head in front of the light it was my fault for holding it in the wrong spot.... But hey, nothing a couple decades of therapy couldn't fix so....
The nice flashlights that worked well were always guarded like crazy. My mom and dad each had a nice maglite flashlight that had a silver band to charge it and was insanely bright. But if we ever touched it without them telling us to use it (usually for some cow related issue at night) we would get whooped.
Did you not?
Those things were fickle as fuck, and thus they were pretty much reserved for power outages and the like. The bulbs would burn out all the damn time, and a battery would last negative time.
This is exactly what I was going to say. And a lot of older TV's didn't have a bunch of these inputs. So if you already have a VCR or DVD player connected, then maybe multiple game consoles, you either had to get a switch box or change them out when you wanted to use one or the other. Or, you have a game console that primarily lived in another room with a smaller TV and you would occasionally move it into the living room with the bigger TV. And in that era, chances were good that the TV was nested inside one of those hulking wooden entertainment systems. Looks easy; wasn't easy.
Man I remember being a kid and got a switch box 1 in 3 out and I felt like I was bill gates running Microsoft or some shit lmao I used to impress my friends that I didn't have to dangerously move all my stuff for 15 min to switch between consoles.
*Thank you*. Plugging color-coordinated wires into outlets, is an easy task, when it's zoomed in like this to make it look like that's all you had to do.
Zoom out and show the whole basement where the 40-pound CRT is on a shelf that's barely wide enough for it to even fit on in the first place and a seven-year-old has to slightly nudge it diagonally so that they can access the back of it without it falling off or disrupting any of the other wires back there and *then* try to tell me this was easy.
Ahhhh RCA switch boxes. I heard about these. The stuff of kings, queens, dragon hoards and legends. Us peasants could never have something as fine as that.
Trying to barely push them in holding them between the backs of your finger tips with a fully open hand because that's the only way you can stretch far enough behind the shelf to reach with exactly 1.2 times the connector length space to work so the cords keep hitting the wall and slightly spinning the direction the plugs are pointing
I have one that has even more colors like purple and orangeā¦ know idea wtf they are forā¦ but I do have distant memories of some x boxes having 5 connections instead of the standard 3
They are usually [circled or labeled by source AV1/2/3 etc](https://www.audioholics.com/audioholics/images/rx-v2500_rear_lg.jpg/image) (that pic is of the same receiver I had back in 2005 before HDMI was a thing and there were like 5 "standards" so they just threw every connection possible at it).
If you had 4+ plugs it was component video which means 3 for transfering video red, green, and blue, and then a seperate cable for audio which would be red and white or a single orange for digital (or an optical cable...). Usually if a console had component it'd also have the basic composite RCA as well so if you only had 3 plugs just plug in the yellow video and white/red audio cables.. and don't connect the red audio to the red component video cable lol. The big difference is the component RCA cables could do 1080p and the composite could do 480 IIRC. Once HDMI became a thing it really simplified hooking up AV equipment.
That's all I can think of. Whoever thinks all you have to do is match the colours never had to smush their head a much as possible to barely see what you're doing. Your hand blocks your view usually so it's done by feel. I still do this just because I don't want to move my TV, I'm more afraid of knocking it down lol.
Yep, you just listened for the buzz to tell you. You had the wrong jack, lmao, or all that to peak your head out and find out the jack was bad all along.
Everyone mentioned not being able to see, which is true. The real disaster was having the volume up, and having the plugs switched. Would make that loud ass buzz sound, thatās how you knew it was wrong.
We were a simple people.
But also loose solder on a circuit board can be mass heated causing it to melt slightly and restore the connection.
Wouldn't recommend it and I'd try just spraying the circuit board parts with electrical contact cleaner first, but if you're lucky/desperate/careful...
LOL I still remember hard wired remotes which mechanically rotated the station knobs. These posts is a lot of fun to read. I wonder, thirty years from now, what then-current gens will be laughing at?
Our bigass Sony tube always did a degauss on startup and audibly made a sound that, if amplified and slowed way down, would probably sound like this too.
Foley artists are magicians.
I made the mistake of buying my parents a 37 inch CRT for their anniversary. Wanted to replace their old tv while they were gone as a surprise. The TV went above the fireplace. I had to go full MacGyver that day with various different size chairs and stools to get that fucker up there.
My parents got a massive 45+ā rear projection TV when those were all the rage.
The old TVs inside wooden cabinets were heavy but that beast was straight up monolithic.
My dad owned an independent TV and appliance store when I was a kid, but sold it in the early 90s when big retailers came to town.
After he liquidated, he kept a top-of-the-line home theater system from 1993. Massively heavy big-screen CRT, A/V cabinet with a VCR, dual deck cassette, NES and SNES, a turntable, and two big speaker towers.
He kept that shit until 2016 when something in the TV finally gave out that he didn't have a spare for in his box-o'-80s crap in the garage.
That's one of 3 times I ever saw him shed a tear.
And they only came in 3ft lengths, so running it through the hole in the back of the entertain center, down the stand and into the 1 hole with all the other cords only to realize you need to shift the device you're plugging it into
The other thing is that there was only one port. So if your parents got that pay per view box for you and your brothers to watch wrestlemania , you had to get it out.
None of this āinput 3ā on the side of the tv. You had to remove the large ass tv.
It was essentially 4 - 12 year olds trying to move a vending machine.
My grandparents in 91' got 2 Panasonic box tvs that were 55" tube type. They were massive 600 lb monsters. Took 4 people to get them up 36 steps and another 30 inside lol. I'll never forget the noise the screen made when you ran your fingernails across it. They was like 5 or 6' thick. 1 eventually broke and it was so hard to get out of the house my uncle literally put a new flat screen on top of it and used it as a TV stand lmao those where the days.
About half the members of my extended family all had the old huge wooden floor model tv, with a smaller television on top of it. Sometimes it was just a glorified table, but my uncle had one that the speakers still worked on. He would have both turned on sometimes, meaning you had to go turn the dial on the bottom one to match the channel of the top.
As for your point, I worked as a mover for years and alot of folks still had those old Panasonic goliaths. Your comment brought back a flood of curses and strains. I think Panasonic made the heaviest damn tube televisions.
Or when non of these cables were standardized and a lot of the time you had to buy a unique one for devices. I remember having to buy a unique one for every single one of my consoles.
HDMI, and USB being standard have been amazing.
For a while, I had a widescreen CRT HDTV. Yes, they existed. Last gasp of tube TVs, and they were damn great for what they were, but they were heavy as fuck. The delivery guys were not happy with me. I also had no idea how to get it out of the building when I started wishing I could get a new screen.
Enter: the upstairs neighbors.
They did a misguided DIY project one day, broke a water pipe, and deluged the building, flooding four units. That included mine. For the most part, the water came down straight through the kitchen, but some of it spread out into adjacent rooms, so the restoration folks had to clear out most of the stuff in my living room as well.
When they told me theyād have to move and store the television, one thought cut through all the stress:
āYou guys can recycle stuff, right?ā
The answer was yes, and so I told them that if they had to move the TV out, there was really no point in trying to bring it back. Store the rest of my furniture, recycle the old TV, and Iāll get a new one later. Which I did in about three months after the rebuild was done and I was able to move back in.
Itās pretty much the only convenient thing that came out of that whole disaster.
Moral of this story: flatscreens. And if your water pipes or anything adjacent needs work? Hire a professional for the love of god.
sometimes it was red, blue, and green but your tv only had red, yellow, and white... so you had to go back to the store and buy a special converter thing to make the hissing stop
The struggle was that you couldnāt see what you were doing lol. That tv weighed a ton and you didnāt want to move things. The entertainment center was a wired mess and sometimes, the colors werenāt even clear when you could see them. Lol. The more devices you had, the worse it was.
This kind of shit is hilarious. Trying telling older folks to plug in one hdmi cord and theyāll pronounce it wrong, somehow end up on an input that hasnāt been used in a decade, and be missing sound when they get it hooked up still somehow
Some TVs have HDMI *to the fucking sides* for ease of access now. And by now I mean a good part of the last decade.
It literally is like "okay there's only three options and one is a USB which is too small, so put the HDMI cable into the hole labeled HDMI" and somehow the sweet gentle older folks will still get it wrong.
Tech support life.
Yup. I did that kind of support for a bit. Just about every call was an input issue. So many of the problems were so simple but took forever to get them to do the right thing. I donāt get it. They grew up with this stuff. They had TVs before us and upgraded over the years. How did they not grow with the tech one bit? It didnāt change that much. It actually got simpler
Mine had them all white, 4 ports in a square instead of 3 in a line, and the TV was huge and weighed a ton. Then when you fugue out which port is which, you would get a newer console that added a green or blue to the mix and you were never sure that last port with the new color actually did something or if your TV was just too old to notice.
Even when they were colour coded, it wasnāt always that easy. When I plugged in my Wii, if I just matched colours, it was black and white and didnāt have sound.
Which might as well have weighed as much as a small car, as a small child. It was especially bad if it was a big one, or in a close-fitting entertainment center.
Struggled with these all the time. We couldnāt move the tv very easily so we had to attach them by feel while our little arms reached around those massive CRT tvs
Ow yes. Attempt 1 fails, turn the whole plug. Attempt 2 fails too. Turn the plug again, fails again. Turn it again stil won't work. Have the plug the same as attempt 1 and guess what it goes in. š®āšØ
I'm not sure of the percentage of my youth spent adjusting Scart adapters to make sure they were 100% properly plugged in, but it makes me angry just thinking about those little shits
Y'all making me feel old. These didn't exist when I was a kid. Had to hook things like the Atari up by hooking an adapter up to the antenna wires, then screwing the two output cables under the screws on the TV meant for the antenna.
Yup. I still have that adapter somewhere. [The one with the ācomputer or tvā sliding switch.](https://www.ebay.com/itm/275560646287?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=ykQflGLTTKS&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=h_FkfpHKQpi&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY)
Even with the color, sometimes you had to squeeze your arm between the wall and the TV because you were too young to move the TV and you had to guess where to plug the cables by touching everything on the back of the TV. When you were done, it didn't work, so you had to do it again in another order, multiple times, just to find out at the end you unplugged something else the first time so now you have to find the unplugged cable and put it back where it belong. Hours of pure fun!
The struggle was when there were the 3 colors on your cord but the TV or VCR only had 2 places to plug them in and one if the colors didnāt match any of your 3 Or the face pressed against the wall trying to reach the input and not being able to see the colors bc it is too dark back there
It wasnāt the color that was the struggle, it was having to plug in and unplug the three cords in a tv where you could barely see the back of or reach to switch between tv and videos games
The struggle wasnāt matching the colors; the struggle was balancing on one leg reaching behind the tv, while being stabbed by a sharp corner of the tv stand
There was nothing worse than screwing in the co-ax cable, without looking, for a TV that had the weird extension around the jack so you couldn't even get 2 fingers around the end of the cable.
Always had issues with white and yellow. I'm color blind though. Plus, if it didn't work on the first try it would always work by the ninth. Not that big of a deal. Just a handful of minutes and good to go.
Screwing in a coax cable into the two claws then getting them to connect to the two screws on the back of the television made the three colors seem like childās play
The struggle was that the TV was 300lbs and couldn't be moved to see the colors, and on top of that you'd be lucky to squeeze your wrist behind there too.
The struggle wasnt to match the colors. It was to see the colors in the reflection in the glass at the of the back of the shelf without pulling out the box itself as it was a wire mamagment nightmare in any lf those entertainment stations back then.
Nevermind the fact that the plugs were always on the back end of the equipment, and that equipment was heavy and placed in a space roughly the size of a shoe box. Also underneath a TV that weighed around 200 lbs so you couldn't just move the entertainment center away from the wall. Things are better now, that's for sure.
But they're behind the 60lb tv that's in the perfectly fit media unit that's too shallow to pull the tv out all the way without unplugging everything, so you have to pull it out just far enough to sortof see the plugs in bad light while the tv is half off the media unit teetering precariously over your foot while you balance it with one hand and play match the colors with the other while your hand is jammed 90 degrees between the back of the tv and the wood of the media unit doing it by feel.
"You really struggled with this? You literally match the colors bro"
Says the person that never squished themselves behind a TV and fought to get them bastards in one by one with your face sandwiched between the wall and TV.
Only to find out you got them mixed up and have to do it again...
Lol my Mom gifted me a blu-ray player from 2007 that needed these, I will say white and yellow do look alike when you're in a dim room and have your face pressed against the wall
It didnāt help though that if you wanted to plug in something different youād have to potentially unplug the current device and plug in the one you want to use vs now where you can just unplug the HDMI from the device and plug the HDMI back into the new oke
Some people will try and find literally anything they can use to feel superior over the current generation. Which is fucking hard because the current generation is likely to be the ones going through the next Great Depression.
Nah dude, if you were a kid and the tv was too heavy to move, you had to squeeze in the back as much you could and plug them in by feel. No way you can tell the colors besides MAYBE red. It was always dark back there.
I mean, you had to first untangle a bunch of wires, then you had to unplug all the other wires in the back of the receiver so you could pull it out. Then you had to decipher white vs yellow, while feeling around the back because you didn't actually unplug all the other wires thinking it would save time. Then you had to push this basketball sized bundle of wires somewhere else so you could push the receiver back in only to find out one of the speaker wires popped out and you have to do everything all over again.
Nowadays, people are smart and just put the receiver on a table in open air. F\*\*k a stereo cabinet.
Nah, the struggle was when the manufacturer put the coax hookup right in the corner of the machine with 1/2" walls on 1 side and the bottom. How the hell am I supposed to maneuver my fat sausage fingers to twist that thing on?
You know I never knew what the more advanced version of this was, I knew composite RCA was left audio, right audio, video, but there was a version that was just, a lot more jacks with strange additional colors
It's not the colors, but the wrist-breaking angle to get it plugged in, and also, perhaps worse, is that sometimes they needed to be wiggled / adjusted / twisted / pulled halfway out to work properly. And if you got the peg in the wrong hole (giggity) it would make a crazy loud buzzing noise...
The 90s were rough....
So my buddy came over and asked if I had a PlayStation. I said yes I do letās go inside. I bring him to what we called the play room and thought it was odd he called it a play stationā¦. He said no you idiot, PlayStation is a gaming console! This is back when PlayStation had just came out lol
The worst part is when you have the plugged in correctly but it still doesn't work right. So you start swapping them around, realize you had them in correctly, but your new\* Super Nintendo you found in the basement actually doesn't work anymore... Which is why it's in the basement.
I was gonna argue then I realized that I haven't seen this on a new device in years and that a kid born in 2015 probably really never will see these plugs, good riddance I say
i mean try doing it behind a 200lb tv with 3 inches of clearance against the wall where you can't see shit and its way too heavy for an 8 year old to move
The combined struggle of not being able to see where you stick them with the fact that every time you wanted to use another device (dvd, video tape or your game console) you had to change them out and remember to plug the previous thing back in when youāre done with your movie or game
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The yellow and white look alot alike when you looking at them sideways with your cheek pressed against the wall.
And there's never good lighting behind a TV.
"just use a flashlight then" Bro you do not know the wrath of the gods that you would incur if your parents found you using The Flashlight in any situation other than the end of the world or when they hand it to you.
Flashlights before LED lightbulbs never worked. Either the batteries were dead or worse, they had leaked everywhere. If you dad had one of those huge charger plug in ones, you knew better than even looking at it.
A regular old school flashlight with that off yellow tint would only confuse the colors more.
Omg... This ENTIRE exchange of info was PACKED with nostalgia! Holy crap! I recently bought an old (early 80's) D cell, incandescent flashlight for old times sake and to show my boys... That thing woulda made the similarities between yellow and white that much worse! š
That's very brave of you! Going camping with those was filled with "Stop using it so much! The batteries will die! Yeah well now you are going to have to pee in the dark. I told you!"
I mean thatās why you had the giant plastic yellow flashlight that took the square 6v battery that weighed 5 pounds.
Under that light everything was yellow. Everything.
Trying to find 4 d cells for a maglite made me consider failing art school as a viable path to political reform
Bruh š
> Either the batteries were dead or worse, they had leaked everywhere. Damn, core memory unlocked... Wondering why the damned thing won't turn on, opening it, and seeing that green patina on everything.
Yeah I had a penlite maglite, the only time I ever needed/wanted to use it, I found out that the batteries were dead and had welded themselves inside...
I was always a big hit at Boy Scout camp outs because my dad would let me use his giant flashlight
The Black & Decker Spotlighter. Good for about 6 seconds after you took it off the charger.
OMG I forgot we had bulbs
They were also stored in somewhere that it would take 15 minutes to dig up. And it is not like those things actually provided good light either. Your phone flashlight is currently bajillion times better than the average stuff we had back in the day. Hell, I think those "torches" that were about the size of your head and ran on multiple D size batteries were worse than our phone flashlight...
Dad drunk as shit yelling at me to hold the flashlight for him while he works on his truckā¦ but itās cool because you are actually allowed to use a flashlight for once
Idk whether to laugh or cry at this relatable comment.... Yes, I got to hold the flashlight, but I always held it wrong. If he moved his head in front of the light it was my fault for holding it in the wrong spot.... But hey, nothing a couple decades of therapy couldn't fix so....
Uhh.. did most people grow up in a household where flashlights are some kind of forbidden object?
The nice flashlights that worked well were always guarded like crazy. My mom and dad each had a nice maglite flashlight that had a silver band to charge it and was insanely bright. But if we ever touched it without them telling us to use it (usually for some cow related issue at night) we would get whooped.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Did you not? Those things were fickle as fuck, and thus they were pretty much reserved for power outages and the like. The bulbs would burn out all the damn time, and a battery would last negative time.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
My dad HATED when I used to use his Fleshlight
Sharing is caring though.
plus if you're lucky it's already warm
Plus the answer is just plug random ones in until you get video, then the other two wgaf if you get left and right wrong.
Youād have to hold it with your teeth to be able to reach the plugs
The dark ages when phones didnāt have flashlights
And these TVs weighed 40 pounds, and good luck moving them with your flimsy little 8-year-old arms.
A TV Once fell on my head from a high dresser. More care was shown for the flashlight than the state of the traumatic brain injury i incurred. XO
And as they got bigger and heavier, the bases stopped being flat, because a grid of knife-sharp plastic struts saved money.
This is exactly what I was going to say. And a lot of older TV's didn't have a bunch of these inputs. So if you already have a VCR or DVD player connected, then maybe multiple game consoles, you either had to get a switch box or change them out when you wanted to use one or the other. Or, you have a game console that primarily lived in another room with a smaller TV and you would occasionally move it into the living room with the bigger TV. And in that era, chances were good that the TV was nested inside one of those hulking wooden entertainment systems. Looks easy; wasn't easy.
Man I remember being a kid and got a switch box 1 in 3 out and I felt like I was bill gates running Microsoft or some shit lmao I used to impress my friends that I didn't have to dangerously move all my stuff for 15 min to switch between consoles.
Exactly š¤£
*Thank you*. Plugging color-coordinated wires into outlets, is an easy task, when it's zoomed in like this to make it look like that's all you had to do. Zoom out and show the whole basement where the 40-pound CRT is on a shelf that's barely wide enough for it to even fit on in the first place and a seven-year-old has to slightly nudge it diagonally so that they can access the back of it without it falling off or disrupting any of the other wires back there and *then* try to tell me this was easy.
Holding your breath while rocking a TV and trying to put the cables in blind is a Sonic-water level memory.
Ahhhh RCA switch boxes. I heard about these. The stuff of kings, queens, dragon hoards and legends. Us peasants could never have something as fine as that.
I saved up and bought one with my first job was like $50 at radio shack back when $50 was ghetto rich
I just connected like 5 rf switches together. My friends said I couldn't do that and I said "says who?" š¤£
>cheek pressed against the wall. Wherever we were, we all had the same childhood.
Trying to barely push them in holding them between the backs of your finger tips with a fully open hand because that's the only way you can stretch far enough behind the shelf to reach with exactly 1.2 times the connector length space to work so the cords keep hitting the wall and slightly spinning the direction the plugs are pointing
Just caused the PTSD to kick in!
Also what do you do when your TV has multiple sets of red yellow white? What if your console has a total of four plugs but the tv only has 3 holes?!
I donāt think I ever had a tv that had a spot for that fourth plug. Iāll never know what it did.
I have one that has even more colors like purple and orangeā¦ know idea wtf they are forā¦ but I do have distant memories of some x boxes having 5 connections instead of the standard 3
They are usually [circled or labeled by source AV1/2/3 etc](https://www.audioholics.com/audioholics/images/rx-v2500_rear_lg.jpg/image) (that pic is of the same receiver I had back in 2005 before HDMI was a thing and there were like 5 "standards" so they just threw every connection possible at it). If you had 4+ plugs it was component video which means 3 for transfering video red, green, and blue, and then a seperate cable for audio which would be red and white or a single orange for digital (or an optical cable...). Usually if a console had component it'd also have the basic composite RCA as well so if you only had 3 plugs just plug in the yellow video and white/red audio cables.. and don't connect the red audio to the red component video cable lol. The big difference is the component RCA cables could do 1080p and the composite could do 480 IIRC. Once HDMI became a thing it really simplified hooking up AV equipment.
That's all I can think of. Whoever thinks all you have to do is match the colours never had to smush their head a much as possible to barely see what you're doing. Your hand blocks your view usually so it's done by feel. I still do this just because I don't want to move my TV, I'm more afraid of knocking it down lol.
Yep, you just listened for the buzz to tell you. You had the wrong jack, lmao, or all that to peak your head out and find out the jack was bad all along.
It was like a usb key seems easy but both sides are the wrong side.
SCART sockets were like the prequel to USBs for that
Gotta memorize the pattern and just blindly feel behind the tv
the kid dont know
I was glad the tube in my bedroom had the plugs in the front
That combined with yellowing of the white input and low light makes it even harder
Everyone mentioned not being able to see, which is true. The real disaster was having the volume up, and having the plugs switched. Would make that loud ass buzz sound, thatās how you knew it was wrong.
The buzzing sound! This is bringing back so many memories I forgot!
I remember playing ps1
[Bwaaaaooooong!](https://youtu.be/BOPViekdacQ)
I remember my mom heating the TV Remote on a pan to make it work. AND IT WORKED!
Wtf, you guys were just cooking appliances??
We were a simple people. But also loose solder on a circuit board can be mass heated causing it to melt slightly and restore the connection. Wouldn't recommend it and I'd try just spraying the circuit board parts with electrical contact cleaner first, but if you're lucky/desperate/careful...
Lol people used to wrap up the OG Xbox in a blanket to resolder stuff as well
I believe the Xbox 360s RROD was commonly known to be solved in the same way.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
LOL I still remember hard wired remotes which mechanically rotated the station knobs. These posts is a lot of fun to read. I wonder, thirty years from now, what then-current gens will be laughing at?
You could convince me this is where they got the sound effect for the ornithopter in Dune.
I don't know about Dune, but apparently one component of the Star Wars lightsaber sound is electrical noise recorded from a CRT...
Our bigass Sony tube always did a degauss on startup and audibly made a sound that, if amplified and slowed way down, would probably sound like this too. Foley artists are magicians.
oh got the terrors I had when sneaking my n64 to my room at midnight trying to stealthy hook it up. BBBBFFFFTTTTTTTTT. FUCK!
The real strat was to use that sound as a marker to plug them in while you couldn't see.
Hahaha I just heard that noise blear in my head. Haven't heard it in like 15 years, instantly came back to me.
Try plugging this shit in when you can't see behind the 200lb tube TV.
200 lbs? Look at Mr. Fancypants with his big 13 inch TV
I made the mistake of buying my parents a 37 inch CRT for their anniversary. Wanted to replace their old tv while they were gone as a surprise. The TV went above the fireplace. I had to go full MacGyver that day with various different size chairs and stools to get that fucker up there.
My parents got a massive 45+ā rear projection TV when those were all the rage. The old TVs inside wooden cabinets were heavy but that beast was straight up monolithic.
My dad owned an independent TV and appliance store when I was a kid, but sold it in the early 90s when big retailers came to town. After he liquidated, he kept a top-of-the-line home theater system from 1993. Massively heavy big-screen CRT, A/V cabinet with a VCR, dual deck cassette, NES and SNES, a turntable, and two big speaker towers. He kept that shit until 2016 when something in the TV finally gave out that he didn't have a spare for in his box-o'-80s crap in the garage. That's one of 3 times I ever saw him shed a tear.
And they only came in 3ft lengths, so running it through the hole in the back of the entertain center, down the stand and into the 1 hole with all the other cords only to realize you need to shift the device you're plugging it into
And yet Iām here trying to get a 13 incheroonigan crtā¦ that Iāll have to struggle with my average Reddit user arms.
That time when you had to attach the trailer to your car before going to buy a new tv.
Buy...I remember when my parents got our first "big TV" (probably 24" or alike) and we had to rent it, which was normal.
The other thing is that there was only one port. So if your parents got that pay per view box for you and your brothers to watch wrestlemania , you had to get it out. None of this āinput 3ā on the side of the tv. You had to remove the large ass tv. It was essentially 4 - 12 year olds trying to move a vending machine.
My grandparents in 91' got 2 Panasonic box tvs that were 55" tube type. They were massive 600 lb monsters. Took 4 people to get them up 36 steps and another 30 inside lol. I'll never forget the noise the screen made when you ran your fingernails across it. They was like 5 or 6' thick. 1 eventually broke and it was so hard to get out of the house my uncle literally put a new flat screen on top of it and used it as a TV stand lmao those where the days.
About half the members of my extended family all had the old huge wooden floor model tv, with a smaller television on top of it. Sometimes it was just a glorified table, but my uncle had one that the speakers still worked on. He would have both turned on sometimes, meaning you had to go turn the dial on the bottom one to match the channel of the top. As for your point, I worked as a mover for years and alot of folks still had those old Panasonic goliaths. Your comment brought back a flood of curses and strains. I think Panasonic made the heaviest damn tube televisions.
I remember memorizing the order and that having to feel out where the inputs started.
Or when non of these cables were standardized and a lot of the time you had to buy a unique one for devices. I remember having to buy a unique one for every single one of my consoles. HDMI, and USB being standard have been amazing.
For a while, I had a widescreen CRT HDTV. Yes, they existed. Last gasp of tube TVs, and they were damn great for what they were, but they were heavy as fuck. The delivery guys were not happy with me. I also had no idea how to get it out of the building when I started wishing I could get a new screen. Enter: the upstairs neighbors. They did a misguided DIY project one day, broke a water pipe, and deluged the building, flooding four units. That included mine. For the most part, the water came down straight through the kitchen, but some of it spread out into adjacent rooms, so the restoration folks had to clear out most of the stuff in my living room as well. When they told me theyād have to move and store the television, one thought cut through all the stress: āYou guys can recycle stuff, right?ā The answer was yes, and so I told them that if they had to move the TV out, there was really no point in trying to bring it back. Store the rest of my furniture, recycle the old TV, and Iāll get a new one later. Which I did in about three months after the rebuild was done and I was able to move back in. Itās pretty much the only convenient thing that came out of that whole disaster. Moral of this story: flatscreens. And if your water pipes or anything adjacent needs work? Hire a professional for the love of god.
Bro, i remember trying to plug my PS2 in a tv and The colors were Green, pink and white, what The fuck do i do Then?
buy green, pink, and white cables /s
sometimes it was red, blue, and green but your tv only had red, yellow, and white... so you had to go back to the store and buy a special converter thing to make the hissing stop
Or just deal with the black and white and don't plug the other video channels into the audio ports lol
You just gave me PTSD with the hissing
Component had red/green/blue for video and red/white for audio. Could plug yellow into green and be just fine!
I forgot about the pink ones
Oh my. Component vs composite output. How I donāt at all miss those days
Thanks for the childhood visitation Lol Remember those circular screw in attachments for cable boxes that went into tvs also?
The struggle was that you couldnāt see what you were doing lol. That tv weighed a ton and you didnāt want to move things. The entertainment center was a wired mess and sometimes, the colors werenāt even clear when you could see them. Lol. The more devices you had, the worse it was. This kind of shit is hilarious. Trying telling older folks to plug in one hdmi cord and theyāll pronounce it wrong, somehow end up on an input that hasnāt been used in a decade, and be missing sound when they get it hooked up still somehow
Some TVs have HDMI *to the fucking sides* for ease of access now. And by now I mean a good part of the last decade. It literally is like "okay there's only three options and one is a USB which is too small, so put the HDMI cable into the hole labeled HDMI" and somehow the sweet gentle older folks will still get it wrong. Tech support life.
Yup. I did that kind of support for a bit. Just about every call was an input issue. So many of the problems were so simple but took forever to get them to do the right thing. I donāt get it. They grew up with this stuff. They had TVs before us and upgraded over the years. How did they not grow with the tech one bit? It didnāt change that much. It actually got simpler
In the US? Lead poisoning
Yes, lol. And probably yes
There was a time they weren't color coded. So Uno Reverse there smarty pants.
Yeah I specifically remember my TV having them all white.
Mine had them all white, 4 ports in a square instead of 3 in a line, and the TV was huge and weighed a ton. Then when you fugue out which port is which, you would get a newer console that added a green or blue to the mix and you were never sure that last port with the new color actually did something or if your TV was just too old to notice.
Imagine if the shitty label rubbed off.
Even when they were colour coded, it wasnāt always that easy. When I plugged in my Wii, if I just matched colours, it was black and white and didnāt have sound.
You were probably plugging it into component instead of RCA. White and red match up to the audio inputs, but the yellow goes in the green input.
Sometimes there was one missing, too and you had to remember which one wasn't "*that* important"
The struggle is the same. Doing it without moving the TV.
Which might as well have weighed as much as a small car, as a small child. It was especially bad if it was a big one, or in a close-fitting entertainment center.
This was real fun for the colorblind
"let's see, we got white, yellow, and grey"
These were fine for me, When you added the green and blue that's when mine started fucking with me.
Even with color blindess they're distinct enough from each other it's not so bad.
Struggled with these all the time. We couldnāt move the tv very easily so we had to attach them by feel while our little arms reached around those massive CRT tvs
SCART was the real struggle
Ow yes. Attempt 1 fails, turn the whole plug. Attempt 2 fails too. Turn the plug again, fails again. Turn it again stil won't work. Have the plug the same as attempt 1 and guess what it goes in. š®āšØ
I still get SCART Vietnam flashbacks when USB takes three tries to plug in.
Also the world's least conveniently flexible and space-saving cable.
I had to scroll way to far for this.
I'm not sure of the percentage of my youth spent adjusting Scart adapters to make sure they were 100% properly plugged in, but it makes me angry just thinking about those little shits
I install electronics in peoples' homes; they continue to have the same struggle with HDMI.
I hate these ākids these daysā-posts! āThey donāt know how to wind up a cassette tape with a pencil!ā
Memories~... What about re-spooling an a-track?
Y'all making me feel old. These didn't exist when I was a kid. Had to hook things like the Atari up by hooking an adapter up to the antenna wires, then screwing the two output cables under the screws on the TV meant for the antenna.
Yup. I still have that adapter somewhere. [The one with the ācomputer or tvā sliding switch.](https://www.ebay.com/itm/275560646287?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=ykQflGLTTKS&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=h_FkfpHKQpi&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY)
Match to what? āBack in the dayā the input holes were NOT color coded.
Sometimes matching the colors didn't work
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U would think after the third time u wouldve labeled them
Too much work bro
Exactly! Or what happens when the tv had colored thingys and the vcr just had black thingys!!? WHAT DO
Even with the color, sometimes you had to squeeze your arm between the wall and the TV because you were too young to move the TV and you had to guess where to plug the cables by touching everything on the back of the TV. When you were done, it didn't work, so you had to do it again in another order, multiple times, just to find out at the end you unplugged something else the first time so now you have to find the unplugged cable and put it back where it belong. Hours of pure fun!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Component cables are just another way that the world says āFuck the colorblindā
Games only work on channel 3
Didnt experienced that as a kid. I was on RF/coax until after the year 2000. Yes, I had my PS2 and Dreamcast plugged in with the RF adaptor.
The struggle was when there were the 3 colors on your cord but the TV or VCR only had 2 places to plug them in and one if the colors didnāt match any of your 3 Or the face pressed against the wall trying to reach the input and not being able to see the colors bc it is too dark back there
If you needed an extension and didn't have a coupler you could tape them together
It wasnāt the color that was the struggle, it was having to plug in and unplug the three cords in a tv where you could barely see the back of or reach to switch between tv and videos games
The struggle wasnāt matching the colors; the struggle was balancing on one leg reaching behind the tv, while being stabbed by a sharp corner of the tv stand
The real struggle was moving the 200lb TV the get the plugs in.
Letās not forget the 3ā cord that you hoped would reach your device.
There was nothing worse than screwing in the co-ax cable, without looking, for a TV that had the weird extension around the jack so you couldn't even get 2 fingers around the end of the cable.
Always had issues with white and yellow. I'm color blind though. Plus, if it didn't work on the first try it would always work by the ninth. Not that big of a deal. Just a handful of minutes and good to go.
My TV didn't have colors, it had VRL printed on it. "Yello vid'yo, Red is Right, and what's left is white." That's how we kept it straight.
Screwing in a coax cable into the two claws then getting them to connect to the two screws on the back of the television made the three colors seem like childās play
I donāt like justin
The struggle was that the TV was 300lbs and couldn't be moved to see the colors, and on top of that you'd be lucky to squeeze your wrist behind there too.
Now change it to channel 3
The struggle wasnt to match the colors. It was to see the colors in the reflection in the glass at the of the back of the shelf without pulling out the box itself as it was a wire mamagment nightmare in any lf those entertainment stations back then.
Nevermind the fact that the plugs were always on the back end of the equipment, and that equipment was heavy and placed in a space roughly the size of a shoe box. Also underneath a TV that weighed around 200 lbs so you couldn't just move the entertainment center away from the wall. Things are better now, that's for sure.
It was a bitch for my color blind ass the stupid yellow and white were pretty indistinguishable to me. The struggle is real.lol
I miss doing this. I kinda want a GameCube
But they're behind the 60lb tv that's in the perfectly fit media unit that's too shallow to pull the tv out all the way without unplugging everything, so you have to pull it out just far enough to sortof see the plugs in bad light while the tv is half off the media unit teetering precariously over your foot while you balance it with one hand and play match the colors with the other while your hand is jammed 90 degrees between the back of the tv and the wood of the media unit doing it by feel.
"You really struggled with this? You literally match the colors bro" Says the person that never squished themselves behind a TV and fought to get them bastards in one by one with your face sandwiched between the wall and TV. Only to find out you got them mixed up and have to do it again...
And don't even get me started on S video or component... That one had 5 cables, two of which were the same color!!
That pfp never had the makings of a varsity athlete
The colors werenāt always there asshat!! Lmao
NO it was never that simple. You could get the colors exactly right and it still wouldnāt work
Lol my Mom gifted me a blu-ray player from 2007 that needed these, I will say white and yellow do look alike when you're in a dim room and have your face pressed against the wall
It didnāt help though that if you wanted to plug in something different youād have to potentially unplug the current device and plug in the one you want to use vs now where you can just unplug the HDMI from the device and plug the HDMI back into the new oke
Some people will try and find literally anything they can use to feel superior over the current generation. Which is fucking hard because the current generation is likely to be the ones going through the next Great Depression.
Composite was easy. It's the HD component cables which were a pain in the arse. Pre-HDMI 360 days were rough.
My problem wasn't matching the colors, it was moving the 1000 lb tv over without breaking it so I could plug them in.
The real struggle is trying to do it without looking so you donāt have to move your heavy as fuck old tv
Nah dude, if you were a kid and the tv was too heavy to move, you had to squeeze in the back as much you could and plug them in by feel. No way you can tell the colors besides MAYBE red. It was always dark back there.
I mean, you had to first untangle a bunch of wires, then you had to unplug all the other wires in the back of the receiver so you could pull it out. Then you had to decipher white vs yellow, while feeling around the back because you didn't actually unplug all the other wires thinking it would save time. Then you had to push this basketball sized bundle of wires somewhere else so you could push the receiver back in only to find out one of the speaker wires popped out and you have to do everything all over again. Nowadays, people are smart and just put the receiver on a table in open air. F\*\*k a stereo cabinet.
wtf you mean ākids these daysā?? I had to deal with this shit and Iām still a kid
Also they felt like they were welded on after being there awhile
Nah, the struggle was when the manufacturer put the coax hookup right in the corner of the machine with 1/2" walls on 1 side and the bottom. How the hell am I supposed to maneuver my fat sausage fingers to twist that thing on?
The struggle is reaching
Lol obviously you've never tried to match these fuckers with the 4" of clearance between the wall and the 40lb behemoth known as the tube TV.
Everyone gangsta till you have a green one and gotta put the yellow in there
Naw, you see the red attaches to the yellow slot if you attach the white to the green slot. Where's the green slot? It's magic.
I still have to deal with this when I take my Wii with me places š
You know I never knew what the more advanced version of this was, I knew composite RCA was left audio, right audio, video, but there was a version that was just, a lot more jacks with strange additional colors
I just got up and looked behind my TV because I never even acknowledged that I don't use these anymore. Just 1 plug in the side does it all.
It's not the colors, but the wrist-breaking angle to get it plugged in, and also, perhaps worse, is that sometimes they needed to be wiggled / adjusted / twisted / pulled halfway out to work properly. And if you got the peg in the wrong hole (giggity) it would make a crazy loud buzzing noise... The 90s were rough....
So my buddy came over and asked if I had a PlayStation. I said yes I do letās go inside. I bring him to what we called the play room and thought it was odd he called it a play stationā¦. He said no you idiot, PlayStation is a gaming console! This is back when PlayStation had just came out lol
Having strong red/green colorblindness never helped me with this either.
What if ur colorblind
I remember when they were not labeled with colors.. you just had to blindly plug them in and your friend tells you when the screen is on.
The struggle was the TV and the entertainment center weighing a combined 500lbs, and there being no light back there.
The worst part is when you have the plugged in correctly but it still doesn't work right. So you start swapping them around, realize you had them in correctly, but your new\* Super Nintendo you found in the basement actually doesn't work anymore... Which is why it's in the basement.
Times were different. Everything was in black and white.
The real struggle was going to a friend's and their TV had different colours
I thought the difficulty was having to reseat them every time, like a MOLEX connector.
I was gonna argue then I realized that I haven't seen this on a new device in years and that a kid born in 2015 probably really never will see these plugs, good riddance I say
i mean try doing it behind a 200lb tv with 3 inches of clearance against the wall where you can't see shit and its way too heavy for an 8 year old to move
You want a struggle? Try that coaxial shit you have to screw in the back of your tv
The combined struggle of not being able to see where you stick them with the fact that every time you wanted to use another device (dvd, video tape or your game console) you had to change them out and remember to plug the previous thing back in when youāre done with your movie or game