I'm just curious if there are any people on here who had cable in the 1970s or 1980s when it first started to come around? I didn't have cable until the 1990s and by then there were a whole slew of channels coming on board. Nowadays there are hundreds, although most aren't that great. Specifically I'm looking for what channels anybody got? I'd have to assume locals, PEG channels and popular ones like MTV, CNN, TBS Superstation, ESPN etc.

Had cable my whole life, born in 1985. I'm not sure when my parents first got it but I had it as far as I can remember.

I remember that the cable box was a small black box (smaller than the standard VCR) and it had a little black remote.

One of my favorite childhood memories was our "wrestling parties". At the time you had to pay a fee to watch the events, mainly Wrestlemania, so parents would rotate by paying the fee and having the party at their house. This was during the 90s.

I had cable in the 1970's but it wasn't anything like they have now. Most of the stations were local channels that you couldn't get with an antenna or that was just too fuzzy with one. Our first regular cable channels were TBS ( though it wasn't called that then) and HBO. I believe we got them around 1978. I remember I was in 6th grade when we got HBO because all the kids were talking about it because they were all giving us a free preview of it. I remember Rocky and All the Presidents Men were on it. Also we didn't have any box or anything back in the late 70's. HBO came on channel 4 and TBS on channel 10 and before that, they were blank channels.. I believe we got USA Network around that time too. It was originally called Madison Square Garden Network and I remember it had alot of sporting events on it. That was on channel 12. Then in the early 80's cable really expanded. I remember it was big news and we did get a box to get all the different channels. Our cable reception was awful. I don't know about anyone else. Half of our channels were fuzzy....some had ziggly lines in them. We had two rolls of channels on the box.. The first one was pretty good but the higher numbers were the ones that were really bad. Luckily cable has gotten better since then. I remember we had CNN, Espn, MTV WGN, Nickelodeon. TNN and I think we had a few that went out of business. We had one news channel ( I forget what the name was) but it went bankrupt and was replaced by CNN Headline News on that channel.

My town was wired for cable in 1976. My memory of cable in those days is similar to Clint's. Only the twelve VHF channels were used, which meant 99.999% of TVs in use were cable ready. :)

There were exactly zero cable networks carried on our system in the beginning, but we did get what were then generically referred to as 'superstations'--WGN 9 and WSNS 44 (11 for us) out of Chicago and WKBD 50 (5) Detroit. We wouldn't get WTBS for another four years, replacing WSNS when the latter became affiliated with a subscription-TV service. Of course we got our three local VHF stations--3 (changed to 2), 8 (changed to 7), and 13, plus UHF stations 35 (10) and 41 (4).

CTV 6 was a text display channel with red, blue and green bands (convenient for color TV adjustment) which showed time, date and temperature at the top, weather information scrolling sideways at the bottom, and community interest stuff scrolling through the big blue field in the center.

The remaining "public access" channels were virtually never used. Three useless channels gave way to two early in 1979 when our system's first subscription movie service was introduced. It was called Cinevue. It only lasted about a year and a half before being replaced with HBO on the same channel.

i was born in 1981 and we got Cable around 1984 so i've had it most of my life. I've loved watching how cable has grown so much. But i do miss some of the early cable shows that used to be a lot of fun; they were just expiermental trying to see what would work.

I had cable in the 1970's but it wasn't anything like they have now. Most of the stations were local channels that you couldn't get with an antenna or that was just too fuzzy with one. Our first regular cable channels were TBS ( though it wasn't called that then) and HBO. I believe we got them around 1978. I remember I was in 6th grade when we got HBO because all the kids were talking about it because they were all giving us a free preview of it. I remember Rocky and All the Presidents Men were on it. Also we didn't have any box or anything back in the late 70's. HBO came on channel 4 and TBS on channel 10 and before that, they were blank channels.. I believe we got USA Network around that time too. It was originally called Madison Square Garden Network and I remember it had alot of sporting events on it. That was on channel 12. Then in the early 80's cable really expanded. I remember it was big news and we did get a box to get all the different channels. Our cable reception was awful. I don't know about anyone else. Half of our channels were fuzzy....some had ziggly lines in them. We had two rolls of channels on the box.. The first one was pretty good but the higher numbers were the ones that were really bad. Luckily cable has gotten better since then. I remember we had CNN, Espn, MTV WGN, Nickelodeon. TNN and I think we had a few that went out of business. We had one news channel ( I forget what the name was) but it went bankrupt and was replaced by CNN Headline News on that channel.

Sounds like what we had back in the 70's. That news network who had went bankrupt was Satellite News Network. I believe they were owned by Group W.

HBO in the 70's on our system required a converter and our cable system wouldn't install it in your home if you had children..later that rule changed to require locks on the HBO converter box in households with children. Also I am pretty sure that back in the 70's most cable systems didn't offer BOTH HBO and Showtime..just one though being owned by HBO, many systems did offer Cinemax alongside HBO. However that would change for many people in 1982 when Showtime merged with The Movie Channel and in the process had made an exclusive deal with Paramount Pictures while HBO/Cinemax did the same with Columbia Pictures. In short such popular movies like Paramount 's Flashdance wasn't seen on HBO while Columbia's On Golden Pond with Henry Fonda..Showtime couldn't show it. Needless to say that "deal" would play a part in making VCRs so popular in the 80's.

Looking back now, while there wern't any cable nets like MTV, Nick, CNN and the like, those "distant" stations more than made up for it. Back in 1975 I can remember visiting my aunt in southwestern Virginia watching TV from Indianapolis, Charlotte, Nashville and Huntington, West Virginia on her cable. I still remember that "Mr. Cartoon" show from Huntington plus I believe the Indy station had a 2 hour local kids block too. Back then by watching those stations you would get so much local flavor that one felt they really were in that city, not in a state hundreds of miles away.

Meanwhile in Northern Virginia ALL the cable systems offered stations from Washington and Baltimore, some even offered local TV from Richmond, Pittsburgh and even Philadelphia ( I still can remember wathcing that city's dance show called "Dancing On Air"..on cable in Virginia !! ).

By the 1980's with more and more cable networks popping up, many of those "regional superstations" ( like Indianapolis' WTTV, Washington's DC 20 and Virginia Beach's WYAH ) well they became less "super" and were dropped

Sounds like what we had back in the 70's. That news network who had went bankrupt was Satellite News Network. I believe they were owned by Group W.

HBO in the 70's on our system required a converter and our cable system wouldn't install it in your home if you had children..later that rule changed to require locks on the HBO converter box in households with children. Also I am pretty sure that back in the 70's most cable systems didn't offer BOTH HBO and Showtime..just one though being owned by HBO, many systems did offer Cinemax alongside HBO. However that would change for many people in 1982 when Showtime merged with The Movie Channel and in the process had made an exclusive deal with Paramount Pictures while HBO/Cinemax did the same with Columbia Pictures. In short such popular movies like Paramount 's Flashdance wasn't seen on HBO while Columbia's On Golden Pond with Henry Fonda..Showtime couldn't show it. Needless to say that "deal" would play a part in making VCRs so popular in the 80's.

Looking back now, while there wern't any cable nets like MTV, Nick, CNN and the like, those "distant" stations more than made up for it. Back in 1975 I can remember visiting my aunt in southwestern Virginia watching TV from Indianapolis, Charlotte, Nashville and Huntington, West Virginia on her cable. I still remember that "Mr. Cartoon" show from Huntington plus I believe the Indy station had a 2 hour local kids block too. Back then by watching those stations you would get so much local flavor that one felt they really were in that city, not in a state hundreds of miles away.

Meanwhile in Northern Virginia ALL the cable systems offered stations from Washington and Baltimore, some even offered local TV from Richmond, Pittsburgh and even Philadelphia ( I still can remember wathcing that city's dance show called "Dancing On Air"..on cable in Virginia !! ).

By the 1980's with more and more cable networks popping up, many of those "regional superstations" ( like Indianapolis' WTTV, Washington's DC 20 and Virginia Beach's WYAH ) well they became less "super" and were dropped
Yea the Satellite News Network was the one I was thinking of. Thanks. :)

It's hard to remember all the channels we had back then. We actually might have gotten WGN before the big cable explosion. I believe that was on channel 8 originally and after awhile when we got the other channels, it was moved. The one think I do remember in the middle 80's was how I was screwed with N@N. I wanted to watch it so bad because they aired all the classic shows, many of whom I had never seen. Well our cable company would air Nickelodeon in the daytime and then at 8:00 the channel would switch over to A&E. We didn't get A&E in the daytime then. It took quite a few years before A&E was given their own channel.

my family got cable way back in 1979 i still remember the first movie that i saw on cable the one and only with henry winkler

I'm just curious if there are any people on here who had cable in the 1970s or 1980s when it first started to come around? I didn't have cable until the 1990s and by then there were a whole slew of channels coming on board. Nowadays there are hundreds, although most aren't that great. Specifically I'm looking for what channels anybody got? I'd have to assume locals, PEG channels and popular ones like MTV, CNN, TBS Superstation, ESPN etc.we had showtime a few locals and wtbs

Yeah, I'm way too young to know cable's "early days", my viewing as a kid was strictly Nickelodeon. I didn't need or want anything else at the time.

90s kids know how good Nick was at that time.

I got cable around 1982 and had it since then, until 2009. January 2010 I bought a house and switched to Dish Net, since cable became way too expensive to keep.

We first got cable in 1977 for a brief while. All it constituted was the addition of two far-off independent channels and PBS. The stations were really great then, as they exuded such a strong sense of locality.

Then, we moved and didn't get cable again until 1980, and it was pretty exciting, seeing the growth of all the satellite channels as they were gradually added... WTBS, CBN, CNN, USA, The Arts Channel, The Nashville Network, etc. All these channels had their own really, really distinct identities back then. Unlike nowadays, where it seems we have a zillion stations all trying to emulate one another, turning the tv-landscape into the weird, unwieldy blob of blandness that we have now.

We got cable in the 80's. I can remember watching MTV around when it first premiered with my sisters.

Cable television has been around since the 40's and 50's-
http://www.ncta.com/About/About/HistoryofCableTelevision.aspx

I was born in 1985 and two years before my parents and siblings moved from the house my dad built to another house in town that was owned my grandfather that was near his bed and breakfast business so my dad could help run the business. We had cable while lived there. I remember at one time the Disney Channel was an exclusive channel you had to pay extra for and you got a magazine that would come in the mail. HBO was the only movie channel we had and back then.

In 1996 we moved back to the house my father built but it was just outside of town so cable wasn't available. We had to get satellite and the provider we went with was Primestar which was bought by DirecTV in late 90's.

During late the 90's and early 2000's more people in town switched to satellite because the cable service in the area had become pretty awful. The local cable satellites were only checked once a week and my friends and relatives said often some channels wouldn't have audio and sometimes the pictures was bad and service techs rarely responded to calls.

I think there are more people right now in that town that have satellite than cable.

Had cable my whole life, born in 1985. I'm not sure when my parents first got it but I had it as far as I can remember.

I remember that the cable box was a small black box (smaller than the standard VCR) and it had a little black remote.

One of my favorite childhood memories was our "wrestling parties". At the time you had to pay a fee to watch the events, mainly Wrestlemania, so parents would rotate by paying the fee and having the party at their house. This was during the 90s.

My parents used to have similar parties for boxing matches and sometimes friends and relatives would chip in to cover the fee.

Note that over-regulation by the FCC stunted the growth of cable TV from the late 50s until the early 70s.

There were still certain restrictions I can recall, such as: if a show (say Andy Griffith reruns) was carried by both a local affiliate and a distant 'superstation' then it would be blacked out on the latter. On our system it wasn't literally blacked out, but replaced by programming from another station. For us, the station that provided such blackout programming was CBET.

But back to Andy Griffith. My memory has faded some with the sands of time but I'll try to recall specifics the best I can. One of our local stations began carrying Andy Griffith reruns, something which one of the superstations (WGN?) had been doing for quite some time. That would normally mean CBET programming being substituted, and I think that was the case for a time. Then the superstation moved Andy to 7PM, at which hour the show on CBET was--Andy Griffith! Surprisingly, instead of resorting to literal blackout, the cable system, apparently having no other source to use as substitute programming, took no action and thus we enjoyed a double dose of Andy. :)

Note that over-regulation by the FCC stunted the growth of cable TV from the late 50s until the early 70s.

There were still certain restrictions I can recall, such as: if a show (say Andy Griffith reruns) was carried by both a local affiliate and a distant 'superstation' then it would be blacked out on the latter. On our system it wasn't literally blacked out, but replaced by programming from another station. For us, the station that provided such blackout programming was CBET.

:)

Some cable systems still do this sort of thing.

A few years ago when I was in Ocean City, MD, the system our motel was using had listed 2 ABC channels ( WMDT 47 out of nearby Salisbury, MD and WMAR from Baltimore ). However once something from ABC was airing the WMAR channel was blocked out and switched to WMDT and considering that most of the syndication stuff like Jeopardy was on both stations well that was blacked out too. Actually the only stuff we got from WMAR was the local Baltimore news.

Meanwhile the next year we went to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Instead of local TV from nearby Virginia and even North Carolina, what did we get? Local TV from DALLAS, TEXAS !! But the motel we stayed at was using Dish Network. I have doubts the local cable was using anything from Dallas. Kinda like a throwback for me as I can remember many many people in West Virginia with those HUGE satellite dishes getting their networks like FOX, NBC,ABC and CBS from Denver and Buffalo. The "joke" at the time was that Buffalo's WKBW actually had more viewers in West Virginia than they did in Buffalo. Anyway all of this was in the early 1990's.