In 1993, my relatives owned a house on Long Island. They still do. But in '93, when I visited I was surprised when I found out that the system they had scrambled Nick.

It was probably a holdover from a prior era like in the previous system that ran the area had an agreement to scramble Nick. Eventually that system was acquired by now defunct Cablevision. I don't think that that company ran that area of Long Island at that time since in 1993 the system carried now defunct Long Island News 1 (not to be confused with the channel on Verizon Fios that has the same name) & there is no way that the provider would carry that channel & News 12 Long Island that launched in 1986.

To my knowledge Nick has never been scrambled around here. Years ago Disney was not a part of basic cable and was probably scrambled or had blockout devices installed.

Odd things do happen in the cable world. Years ago an Indianapolis suburb, Greenwood and the general area was served by a company called Insight. They had an equipment/office location in the area. When they expanded their channel lineup to higher, so-called digital channels, they duplicated virtually every lower channel "up there." Comcast bought this out years ago, and to this day, they still have this odd channel lineup, totally unlike their Indianapolis lineup. You'd think they would have consolidated it, but, nope.

Back in the 80's my cable company had Nickelodeon and A & E sharing a channel. I got Nick in the daytime and as soon as N@N came on it switched to A & E. It used to make me mad. I missed the heyday of N @N.

My cable system had Nick/A&E in the same channel as well. A&E came on from 8p-6a. For 1988-1991 or so Nick scheduled an hour of Looney Tunes on Sat & Sun. I always had to miss the second half hour which made me upset. Not to mention that sometimes A&E would be on past 7a due to someone being asleep at the switch.

That changed in 1990 when my system separated the channels but they paired them up with different channels. Nick was on 24/7 except for the thirty days when MSG 2 (a regional sports network) came on with a game that MSG 1 couldn't show. One time my cable system stayed with MSG 2 even though it was simulcasting what was on MSG 1 (which was an episode of WFANs Mike Francesa talk show that he hosted from inside MSG (the arena). His guest: Bill Cosby.)

I used to live on Long Island and worked for Cablevision- This was prior to 1993, I believe 84/85 time frame, When Nickelodeon ended it's programming day at 8PM, and Nick at Nite started there programming- due to limited channel capacity- At 8PM the programming was then scrambled, but it was not Nick at night- but Cablevison's initial in house PPV service- which there were 4 movies initially available throughout the month there was a bill insert where a subscriber would return the card and the orders would be entered manually in the cable data system and in turn the movie would be descrambled for those that purchased them- I even remember the initial titles which were The little drummer girl and Terminator- We have come along way with technology :)
I miss the old days of the familar scramble sync signal :)

Whe nmy cable system had stuff on the analogue tier Nick was not ever scrambled.....