This was the cable TV box issue by Philadelphia-based Jerrold.1 It typically sat on top of the television (back when televisions were large and had tops, kids). You could access any of three dozen cable channels by adjusting the switch on the far left to top, middle or bottom, and then clicking one of the channel buttons. The dial on the right was a fine-tuner.
Typically, you'd have a printed list of channels somewhere by the box, so that you could decide which channel to watch. Some boxes had a label across the top or bottom showing the channel options. There were remote controls at this time, but not everyone had them. Many cable boxes still required you to get off the couch, walk to the TV and pick a new channel. Surfing was more exercise then.
Here are some memories of Jerrold cable boxes that I've curated from across the internet:
- "I can hear the click just looking at this photo"
- "37 channels! Ridiculous, who would ever need that many?"
- "My uncle had one and I thought he was rich"
- "That magic box brought 10-year-old me MTV. That's 1986 MTV when it meant something. We had two radio stations in my area and three of them were county music stations. But, now I have access to all the music they had in Denver and LA. From Huey Lewis to Ozzy to Run DMC. Plus Martha Quinn and that guy with the hair."
- "It’s often what set us apart: The kids who watched Fraggle Rock and those who couldn’t."
- "My parents had a remote for theirs. It was called me."
- "I was recently looking through old family albums and came across a pic of my grandfather commandeering that box like it held the nuclear codes. But hey - his command led me to a lifelong love of nature shows and Jeopardy!"
And here's a screenshot from a 2010 post on The Atlee Willis Museum of Kitsch.
There are also lots of memories about the, ahem, shenanigans you could get into with the Jerrold boxes and attempting to access premium cable channels:
- "Thing about that Jerrold cable box was that there was a PROM chip on the bottom that the cable company could program so that it would scramble the premium channels you weren't paying for. But you could erase the PROM by shorting its pins to ground. With some care, and a long hat pin, you could stick the pin through a hole in the bottom plate and fish around until something sparked. And just keep doing it until you got all the channels."
- "If you pressed 18 all the way and 16 half way you can see HBO unscrambled."
- "If I put the channel switch knob between 20 & 32 I got free HBO for years"
- "Trying to switch it to the scrambled Playboy channel so that you might catch a shot of a boob, though it was green and purple and slanting sideways from the scrambling?"
- "My grandmother had one of these and one of my uncles (hacked) it with a folded playing card somehow."
Footnote
1. For more on Jerrold, check out this 2024 Retroist article.
No comments:
Post a Comment