Before FOX started 23 years ago, what was in its place on the channel line-up?

all the fox stations were indipendently owned and the programers made there own lineups as they saw fit

i for got to add that some of them such as wnew nyc and kttv in la were owned by john kliuge and metromedia corp.

I didn't even get a Fox channel until the fall of 1989. It wasn't on our cable lineup. I remember a few of the local channels carried the Emmy Awards from the FOX network after it got the awards.

FOX had trouble getting into some markets even into the 90's. It wasn't til they got the NFL in 1994 that they became avaliable everywhere(two of the biggest stations in Birmingham and Atlanta affiliated with either ABC or CBS switched to FOX after that).

But yeah, before that they either didn't exist or were some kind of independent station.