The first business location I had was in my garage, and I worked on "color televisions" among other things.

Those early remotes (volume up/down, channel up ONLY) had little hammers that banged different length rods, emitting a different audio frequency. The TV had a microphone that "listened", and the mic circuit had tuned coils that had to be tweaked to the right frequency for the right function. That activated motors for volume or channel change. Channel change was from 2 to 13, then back around to 2 again. If you missed channel 4, you had to go all the way around again, since it only went "channel up".

So at the same time I rode a Honda 500 with a disc brake on the front. With a little road grit in the disc pads, pushing the bike into the garage could cause a "squeak" as the pads and disc interacted. Once I pushed it at just the right speed, and a Zenith color TV started changing channels, again, and again, and again!

Anyone that old would know that sound, ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk...

You could also get the TV to cower in fear, and wildly change channels and volume, by aggressively jingling a set of house keys at it. What a weapon!

When I moved to NC in 84, the house we rented had a Motorola Quasar "works in a drawer" TV, with that fine Space Command remote. It was a big old ornate wood cabinet that came with the place (house also came with party line phone service).

[Link: flashbak.com]

There was a crack on the circuit board and the work around was to leave the drawer just lightly open, but it did still work in 1985 when we moved.

I don’t get what the drawer part is

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Google Motorola "Works in a drawer" and you see an image where the drawer is pulled out.

The main electronics was on a drawer behind the knobs and speaker on a slide out for service. Supposedly to help make service easier since the back of the set didn't need to be removed. You simply turned a locking device, and pulled the drawer out to get at all the good stuff.

Ah, found it. That looks safe

My aunt & uncle had one of those TVs- I think their dog chewed the remote and with kids, expenses and a new home, he decided that he wasn't going to replace it. He worked for the old AC-Sparkplug plant as an engineering technician, which eventually became Delphi and knowing how it worked, he took a wooden dowel, cut notches along it, cut a piece of aluminum bar and fastened that to the end by drilling a hole in the bar and using a brad nail. All he had to do to get it to work is rub a pen across the grooves but it took a little trial and error to find the correct frequency. Probably brought his oscilloscope up and connected a mic for that although he may have had a spectrum analyzer.

I call projects like that either science projects or art projects, and they all share these characteristics:
*the doer doesn't know what he's doing at the start
*there's no way to tell how long it's going to take
*there's no way to tell how much it's going to cost

We see these often with custom one-off speakers, and the guys who show up here maybe two per year asking about how to, say, regulate the air flow squeaking out of a balloon so as to control a Sony TV. Well, not that, exactly, but just as hare-brained.

Tomciara,

When you talked about the remote with only channel up, specific audio tones and your motorcycles it brought back a memory of our TV when I was a kid wher mom would run the vacuum past it and it would change channels. Ka-chunk.

I always thought it was an RF signal generated by the remote.

Ernie I completely forgot about the keys. Hilarious. I remember that too.

Haha. Classic.

No one will look back fondly at Netflix buffering and HDMI being a big piece of shit.

Would you call those the good old days then?

Craig

There's a photo in there of a chick with a guitar, and she's wearing some bent metal thing that rests on her forehead. I've never seen anything at all like that outside of photos from Woodstock and its mud... and I remember the sixties.


These will be the days of convergence -- remember when that was the word used to describe something good that we thought was coming -- where all this stuff is converging up our asses.


I forgot to point out that I was also my mom's remote control, turning the volume down for every commercial. We did that so many times that the volume control wore out.

One of my first installations was a rewiring of the headphone jack on the front of the TV. A fifteen foot two wire cable plugged in there. My mom held a small metal chassis with an on/off switch on it, so she could turn the ads off. That reduced my remote needs to channel changes.

Looking back, I realize that must have been a hot chassis set, which I knew nothing about. It's a good thing I have ALWAYS had decent wiring skills and nothing touched the box she had in her hands!

If you're referring to my uncle, it wasn't a matter of not knowing what he was doing- he worked on the guidance system for Apollo and later, missile recognition for the GM tank weapons systems.

Then how can it be hollow?

Foil covered chocolate coin.

On a hot day, in your pocket.... LOL

There is no evidence of it being hollow but i guess its possible. Something can be flat round and hollow at the same time. You just know that there are no cookies inside.