I made my own Pay TV decoder way back then. It would decode the same RF Pay TV channels as did the Zenith models. The total cost for an individual decoder, was 6 dollars tops. The 1 inch by 4 inch assembled decoder PCB only pulled about 15mA. With that being the case, if you already had a Cable TV box that came with volume control, that meant that you could put my decoded board inside it, and then tap the +12Vdc line for power. Then you just cut the analog video wire that jumps from the units RF Demodulator on over to the RF modulator, and connect the RF Demodulator and the RF modulator to the decoder board instead. Job done. It now decoded every Pay TV channel. It decoded the scrambled channels, line by line, thus there was no PLL(Phase Locked Loop) delay problems. Since there was no delay when you selected a pay channel, there was no way for you to tell if you were watching a pay channel or not, other than by knowing what channel you had selected. Fun days back then.
@@nm7781 I was a technician back in those days and worked for a company that manufactured TV Cable Converters. So it was easy to know how the Pay TV scrambled the video at that time by taking a quick peak. Normally you have the video line by line signals each in combination with horizontal sync pulses that are located below the video level, positioned there such that the TV can detect them. To scramble the picture, they had raised the horizontal sync pulses up into the video level such that the TV's could not detect them, hence the TV could no longer be in horizontal sync with the video line signals, and in turn the images looks all scrambled. However, the horizontal sync pulses that are present within each vertical sync pulse, were not touched at all. So I used them to start looking ahead a specific time period from each H-pulse via the use of a time delay IC, to see if the next H-Pulse was in the wrong position, or not. If it was in the wrong position, the circuit would correct the error, and then use this corrected H-Pulse to trigger again the time delay IC to know again when to look for the next H-pulse to see if it too needed correcting. So it thus became a very very simple line by line H-Pulse correction circuit.
I love this era of cable, I was fascinated by cable when I was little, which led me to be a cable guy later in life. We didn't have cable at home, but we had it at my grandparents house, and I was notorious for doing something to that woodgrain zenith st-1600 that required calling the cable company. When Media One bought out Continental Cablevision in the late 90s, they came in and replaced the st-1600 with the General Instruments cft-2200, then when I locked that out one day and required a call to the cable company, I was no longer allowed to touch the remote, but got that call from my grandmother when she needed to know how to program her new remote and I was a cable guy :) I have the CFT-2200 (they have them on ebay for $10-$20 shipped at times), I am getting my st-1600 any day now, and am considering getting a Scientific Atlanta box, as I have dealt with them too where my family had JONES Intercable (never figured out what "intercable" was). I also have a Primestar satellite box, you must remember Primestar was owned by TCI cable, and had a really awesome remote with a grid of multicolored buttons which corresponded to categorized channels sorted by genre. When I worked as a cable guy, I would collect little bits of history, like really old splitters, tags, notch filters, old remotes or things with old logos, sometimes I would get lucky and someone would pull out all their old literature they had in their endtable for 10+ years and didn't mind parting with in exchange for new guides. Checking by the dumpster at night scored me a few old signs and such after the construction division replaced them with new stuff. All this stuff is a fascinating history of how we went from something so simple that a 13 year old with soldering skills could break to something that you have to have a strong proficiency in hacking and digital signals to get around, and how the whole feel of cable used to be in your face and "friendly", when it was a serious luxury they were selling. As for having no signal, you should do what I plan to do, build yourself a personal headend using (a) cheap RF modulator(s) and (a) video source(s), like a dvd player or VCR. A fun one would be to get a dirt cheap TV out video card and an old PC and put the weatherstar 4000 emulator program on it, for some good old vintage nostalgia.
Compudude -- if you by some chance receive this notification, would you shoot me an email at maxraphaelgreen@gmail.com ? I am a radio reporter and I'm working on a story about this era of cable, you sound like you'd be an excellent person to chat with
Compudude86, would you be interested in an old Oak industries "econobloc" Model B19? ...it has a knob to select either 2 thru 13 or A thru G, and also has an accompanying fine tuner for the A thru G. It appears to be in great shape for it's age, considering this is probably from circa 1977-79. I have no idea if it works or not, but I've opened it up, and I saw no components that looked scorched, damaged, loose, etc. It was probably just "retired" like so many of these were when better or more compact devices came along. Message me on here if you are interested, we can go from there. Peace!
The test chips were why the scrambled premium channels where typically the first thing that died when cable companies switched an area to digital service, even if the rest of the analog channels were available for several years after. In Toronto for instance the analog scrambled channels all went away in (IIRC) 1999 or 2000 when Rogers introduced digital service and they forced you to get a digital box if you wanted them. I also remember my grandfather would borrow a neighbour's descrambler when there was a movie on he wanted to watch. This worked because these boxes are all dumb receive-only systems and with ZTAC the authorization data to turn boxes on and off (at least on the same headend) was sent as pulses in the VBI so every box and every house would get it. The last publicly available scrambled analog TV channel (so not counting closed circuit stuff like hospitals and hotels) was probably M-Net in South Africa which kept its Oak Orion system alive until 2018.
We got a Cable box from Continental Cablevision back in 82 or so and it had a manual click dial and a fine tune know to the right. I had lots of fun with that thing. I'd fine tune Cinemax in to a point where the scrambled line would almost shift off the screen to the right or left and try to get my parents to let me watch stuff. Then the line would come back and I'd try to fix it again. After a few times they would tell me to change it. But I did see a few movies for free this way. I love this stuff. I hope to own an original ONTV box someday also to show off to friends.
The local cable company where I live used to use the woodgrain Zenith boxes from the mid-80s up until 2000, when they went digital and started using the Motorola DCT2000 digital cable boxes. Those Zenith boxes were used for Zenith's "Z-TAC" (Zenith Total Addressable Control) CATV scrambling system, which the boxes could actually be addressed and controlled by the cable company to automatically descramble channels that were subscribed to, which also made pay-per-view movies and events possible with this system. It made cable piracy a bit more difficult (although I believe "test" chips were also available for Z-TAC boxes as well, IIRC). I remember as part of the addressing system Z-TAC used, whenever the converter box was unplugged or unpowered for a period of time, it would lose it's addressable programming by the cable company as to which subscribed channels it was authorized to descramble. As a result, after powering it up, none of the channels would be descrambled or displayed--the converter would just output black video with silence. What you'd have to do then, is to tune in the box to a dedicated channel on the cable TV system for a few minutes to reprogram and reauthorize the converter box (my CATV provider used channel 28, the Discovery Channel was there at the time). I believe the CATV company would insert the programming data in the VBI (vertical blanking interval, where closed captioning and teletext data is also carried in an analog video signal)) of a particular channel (28 in this case) to activate or reactivate a Z-TAC cable box to whichever channels the customer subscribed to.
I was fortunate to live with grandparents who owned one while I was growing up. I watched WWF/WWE pay per views every month. Wish we still had it around
My old man did the same!! and if i recall the Horse racing channel that they used for Phone Bet would turn into the porn channel after 11pm lmaooo...good times.
My first cable supplier, in 1974, just hooked the cable directly into my TV's antenna input...no set-top box. That was because the cable company offered only 12 channels (2-13). My first cable box (1978) had two channel knobs, labelled A and B. Each knob had channels from 2 to 13, for a total of 24 channels. My second cable box (1980) had a slide bar for channel selection, that gave me a whopping 36 channels. Neither came with remotes.
I vaguely remember the day when these suddenly stopped working, was such a bummer. We had the Sci-ATL one, we had Encore, Showtime, HBO, and I got to watch all the wrestling/boxing ppv's for free throughout the 90's. Wish I could go back in time sometimes and just channel surf. Good times!
We rented the scientific Atlanta box. Funny seeing these years later. A friend gave us a descrambler in the late 90s. We had the normal cable box, but had the add on descrambler where you feed the outside cable line to the add on and the other end to the cable box. Watched all the wrestling and adult channels. 😂
Cellmate 1: What you in for? Cellmate 2: "I stole cable and pirated Bash At The Beach 96" Cellmate 1: *Screams loudly* GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU FREAK!" 😂😂😂
A retired police officer was making money selling these black boxes in the entirety of the 90s in my town. He made it his mission to sell one to every family in the town lol. Then when these were obsolete due to the rise of comcast/direcTV, he was selling those satellite tv all access cards. I don't know if he was caught.
Before it became an ABC affiliate in the big United States broadcast TV affiliation switch, which began in 1994 and ended in 1996, KNXV-TV 15 was one of the various TV stations that would sign off at night in the 1980s and then air ON TV Pay TV programming that needed to be descrambled with an ON TV box.
Back in my home town, we had a scrambled channel over channel 16. It must have been there from about 1982 to around 1989. I remember being able to pick up the audio on a hand held radio. My parents never subscribed to it, but it was a channel called "STAR movie channel" (no, not Starz) No one ever remembers it, but it was on C-Band.
1981, we had the box one earlier where we could fold a matchbook in half and stop the knob halfway in between and get HBO for free, and I think MTV was a premium then as well. Cool to see those again...
It wasn't too hard to reverse engineer the signal. The standards, including the waveform, for a normal video signal are published. Being very careful about grounding, using an isolation transformer if necessary, it is still possible to connect an oscilloscope to an older TV set, synchronizing the scope to the TV's vertical oscillator, and observing the video signal. Then, a second TV could be modified to temporarily provide a fixed, adjustable, voltage to its AGC, and tuned to the subscription TV channel. Have the first TV provide the oscilloscope with sync and observe the video waveform on the second TV. Typically, the horizontal synchronizing pulses were suppressed. The pulses could be restored by inserting gain during the horizontal sync interval. A convenient place to insert the gain was in the connection from the tuner to the IF amplifier, using a FET amplifier. You could use the TV set's own horizontal pulse as a timing reference, having it trigger an adjustable one shot, which would trigger a second one shot, which would increase the gain of the FET amplifier. The signal might have trouble locking up but, once locked, would stay locked until interference caused it to unlock. Some subscription TV stations put a pilot tone on the audio at the horizontal frequency. If you had a UHF to VHF converter with output on channel 6 sitting around, you could connect it to an FM stereo radio, tune in the UHF station's sound at about 88 MHz, tweak the coil for the stereo pilot, and get a mix of program sound and the barker. Connect a speaker between the left speaker "hot" and right speaker "hot", adjust the balance control and you had the program sound. The stereo pilot could be picked off and used as a timing reference for circuitry inserting gain in the TV set. Zenith had its SSAVI boxes for over the air subscription TV. The SSAVI stood for the method used, Sync Suppression And Video Inversion. The horizontal pulses during the vertical interval were normal but suppressed the rest of the time. Video inversion produced a picture like a photographic negative, but not all the time. Undoing the video inversion was tricky, but could be done. Zenith modified the scheme slightly for its cable TV premium channel boxes, shown in the video. Zenith used an addressing scheme coded into lines in the TV picture vertical interval. The test chips typically made the address always match and inserted ones in the enable bits. There was a parity bit and some test chips didn't change it, So, about half the time the data was rejected for a parity error but, eventually, the box was enabled for all channels.
The other Zenith was probably late 90s, in the early 2000's most systems went digital for pay TV. I don't remember any boxes that came out in 2000, they were phasing out analog, the Zenith blocked the audio, too SA didn't! Also, before we got the SA box, we had 13 channels and a box for HBO/Showtime (probably on channel 9X) you turn to channel 4, flipped the box. There were TONS of analog cable boxes but, your demo is spot on
My parents had something called IT SelecTV. There were two channels, A & B. B had dirty movies on at night. This service went away in the mid 80's. Also remember the box had a 5 digit combination dial for the monthly scramble key which was sent with the bill.
Thanks for preserving this bit of history. We had that Scientific Atlanta box to replace an older one that used a separate descrambler which i think was Hamlin brand. The SA addressable box allowed the company to eliminate scrambled channels entirely instead of getting a distorted picture which was way more fun.
I was always fascinated with Cable TV as a youth, especially because I didn't have it growing up. My friends and family had and i was so jealous, but my parents were against paying for TV. I missed out on the MTV and Nickelodeon golden years of the 80s. I also watched alot of WWF in the 80s and 90s and missed out on those cable shows. I learned alot about these descramblers later on. I noticed a few friends had different types of boxes and got most of the channels. I saw the ads in Rolling Stone and Playboy. Once ebay came out it was a marketplace to buy them. I bought a Panasonic VCR that had a built in descrambler around 2003-04, I was very skeptical about this since cable was converting to digital and dvds were taking over. It actually worked to my surprise, some channels had bleeding colors but no way to adjust this. At the time I said, if I had this 10 yrs prior it would have been cooler, so concealed to be built in a VCR.
We had ON t.v in the early 1980's just like the single choice ON box you have on the bottom of the two ON boxes in your vid here when I was a kid in Chatsworth, CA. After we had ON t.v., we got another service called SELEcT.V., and if I recall, it had 3 choices of pay channels.I also recently acquired an old Oak industries "econobloc" here in North Dakota, and was surprised to discover oak industries had also made our old original ON t.v. box too. There were only a few companies making decoders, traps, descramblers, etc. back in the beginning...cable company monopolization was rampant and it was a cat and mouse game with the FCC. Each time the feds clamped down it was like moonshiners who not only found a way around most of the regulations the FCC imposed, but they even seemed to improve their game. Unfortunately the cable companies also used the regulatory turmoil to their advantage in a rather greedy way and put the screws to the end user. I have to laugh, because I clearly remember the big sales pitch many of those big cable services used to entice more people to buy cable service....it was "commercial free television" Welp, ladies and gentlemen....their profits have been rolling in since the mid 1970's from the money they make from ads on cable t.v., they've covered their running costs a million times over and what did we get for it? ....hmmm, well now we get to pay even more ridiculously higher fees for cable t.v., we get to see almost CONSTANT commercials .......and we get to see their stupid station i.d. badge WITH ADS in the corner of the screen all the time too. Yeah,...so much for "commercial free t.v." ha ha ha
I have the Jerrold Starcom III prototype - with a wax witness lug to prevent opening the box to see the electronics inside - it's immaculate and pretty cool.
Oddity Archive had done a couple videos on the ON tv subscription tv service back, in fact I have the video he did on the service in my recommended video feed that sits next to the comments section. I think he said that how they managed to pull off the scrambled signal was basically to transmit a 15 hz sin wave to mess with the tv. Edit: and I think he mentioned about how people figured that out and figured out how to get past the 15hz signal and were able to build something out of radio shack parts and were able to get past the 15 hz signal and get the signal clear.
A coworker had a cable box with "test chip" and had friends over to watch a pay-per-view fight on the local cable TV system. Sometime during the program, a message appeared on the screen "You are using an illegal decoder." Apparently, the cable company changed the digital code accompanying the program to something none of its boxes were allowed to receive, and made those screens go blank. After sending the message, the cable company switched the code back, so its viewers didn't really notice anything wrong. The "test chip" boxes let everything through, including the message! I'm sure some viewers thought that they had been "busted". A few who had invited friends over and had everyone chip in on the cost were probably embarrassed to have to admit that they hadn't paid for the event.
I sure do remember that wooden box! ON-TV was available in Miami, too. As a kid, I caught my first glimpse of it in 1980, when my father had one installed.
My uncle created the first bullet proof box back in the late 80’s to almost 1999 until Time Warner and the feds raided his business. He used to ship us 50 to 100 boxes at a time back in those good old days. And these were the cream of the crop that got all pay per view channels all the time and could not be “zapped”
While commenting, I was going to name drop a Direct TV alternative and decoding locations but found that the DSSrookie website is down. They housed nearly every converter box command codes to train the LMB (think that's the name of those circular parts of a satellite dish) to decipher every channel. I had the Viewsat model and a Direct TV dish. The knowledge was annoying with satellite codes and Scientific Atlanta quick board installations because of frequent signal disruptions. No one wants to "keep" paying you for your time resetting the system to test mode. Luckily the SA at least had a 40 pin processor that never stopped. Oh the times.
I think you're right. SelecTV was on Channel 22. Between ONTV and SelecTV, ONTV was the easier of the two to descramble. There were kits sold at flea markets to do that. You could receive the station for free, but the signal quality was only fair to poor. Eventually these services vanished, as cable was built out through the region.
@@roachtoasties I made one from a kit mail ordered. What they did was remove the vertical sync signal so the TV would scramble you could hear the voice. The kit I got had a dial that re-created the sync just turn a knob until the sync was correct screen unscrambled. This was also used for large satellite dishes. Later they encrypted the audio lot of microwave receivers restored the sync.
@@Mike-01234 A friend of mine built one. The cabinet resembled a small desk speaker made from wood. I remember the knob to adjust things. The quality of the picture wasn't as good as the real service, but what do expect for free. He eventually gave me the box, but by then the service was on its decline before it eventually shut down.
In Chicago we had Spectrum TV, similar to ONTV, all while fiber was being laid in preparation for something much bigger. I just didn't know what it was at the time. With Spectrum, we had a set top box being fed by an antenna on our roof via coax. We'd just turn to channel 3 to view the content. I was very pleased with one channel. In the South, my aunt had a HBO set top box that also provided one channel. I recall Cinemax being launched which gave you three channels, then came cable. Cable was limited by the infrastructure of that time. Fiber wasn't being utilized so RF signal would travel via coax directly from the central office or the head end to the home which resulted in signal degradation. Fiber was and is the game changer.
I remember my family's first cable box. It was a nougat-colored Hamlin cable box with simulated wood grain on top, plus a lighted strip with channel selection on it. It had a sliding selector underneath the lighted channel strip to select the channel of our choosing, whether it was Nickelodeon, VH-1, Family Channel, MTV, TNN, The Weather Channel, TBS, WGN, etc.
Build my own simple simon descrambler and worked great, even during the antipiracy time, just had a remote to deactivate during the siren period. Pilot less gated sync. Then came Direct TV 1000 channels wide open.
The good ol' days. Oh man. Seen so many great movies back in the day on my cable box. I'm in Canada and I remember at the height of it there was TMN, Moviepix and Viewers Choice. It was awesome! Nowadays with netflix and all that stuff it's just not the same. You spend more time picking what to watch than actually watching something. Not only just spending time picking, but I also found myself constantly looking up IMDB ratings and reviews before watching. Not what I call relaxing at all. It's a never ending cycle of indecisiveness. A few months ago I ordered the TMN and HBO package. It's so nice to just turn on the tv and do some good old fashioned channel surfing for movies. It's nice to just catch something on TV and watch it. Feels like 1993 again. It's the healthier choice. lol.
Great video. I worked with the Cablenet system in the early 80's and remember the Zenith Z-TAC boxes. I have a few of the old "wood grain" Zeniths still with even older remotes than you have.
Up until about about January 2018 or so, at least near where my grandparents on my mom's side in cohoes ny, there were still channels that existed that were unscrambled on cable. You read that right, unscrambled cable TV channels in New York, at least cohoes, I think there are a few places that are able to pick up unscrambled cable TV stations. I remember back when I was able to watch cable TV back in the day 24/7, my family (my parents, sisters and I) were able to pick up quite a few channels. If coarse, it wasn't as much as if you had cable or satellite, but you could pick up something of 50/60 channels. granted, most of the time you could pick up channels from 2 to about 75 or 79, but a lot of the time, the amount of channels that were filled in between those 2 channels dropped off after about 52 or 53 or so. you'd see a channel that was active after every 3rd or 4th or so empty channels, give or take, and there was 2 or 3 or so channels I think under channel 30 that were empty. I think it was channel 7, 15 and 16. I forget if those were the exact channels or not, but I think those were the channels.
My granddad had a Pioneer Cable box with a white finish and red led display. It would receive all the channels. The box in the living room ended up with the E4 on the display.
I remember ON TV back in early 1980's I think ON TV was better than this new technology today. I enjoy watching cable TV very much but it's not good enough on the other hand cable repeat the same thing so much; But I was watching You Tube and saw some old ON TV promos and this brought back some good memories to me, this was the original cable TV of it's time.
I had that wood grained Zenith in the early to mid 80's and underneath it was safety Torx screws. First time I had ever seen those screws before. Yes, I got into it more than a few times, lol, returning it to the cable company when I blew it. It was extremely hard to get the safety torx screwdriver back then (pretty much impossible) so I took a T10 or it was a T15 (still have that screwdriver in my toolbox too) and broke the middle out so a plain Torx could work.
I have had subscription TV and still had the free local television and spent most of my time watching the free television most of the time and decided to drop my subscription and stay with the local TV only.
Thanks for posting this. We had various SA boxes over the years and I'd always wanted to see what was inside and tinker with it. But I never had the Torx security bits. Until now. I'd never seen the inside. Considering how hefty those boxes were, it is surprisingly empty. Never would have guessed. Nice word on the mod chip. That would have been a super hack back in the day. We had a legal version for a while when a family member worked for the local cable company. Employees got every channel except PPV descrambled free as a perk. So we had all the movie channels and even Playboy TV. Good times.
Thank you for making this video. I wasn’t conscious when these were in use. Always wanted to know how they worked. I wonder if they can be adapted for different purposes or up cycled.
The green light Zenith box came out in 1990. The red light box came out around 1992. I had both of them. They had a similar version of that green light box that came out in 1996.
I think the Zenith system was the most common scrambling method for cable companies back in the 1980's and 1990's. There was also Tocom, Jerrold, Hamlin, and a few others. I wouldn't be surprised if they were pirated the same way that Zenith and Scientific Atlanta were.
On TV in Phoenix in the 80s was sent via a microwave signal where you had to mount a mw antenna pointing directly at the source to get the signal so wasn't sent over UHF there.
I remember seeing the black boxes when I was a kid in the 90's I didn't know at the time the black boxes were illegal. My uncle had told me that TV stations at the time use to have a signal and send something through the bullet line to find out who had the cable black box. My uncle did tell me that people use to get busted for having the black box on the antenna or analog TV. I found out 2 years ago that back in the 80's and 90's tv stations use to restrict channels.
I remember in the early 70s when catv actually meant community ANTENNA tv. In Western Arkansas we had a giant 200ft antenna to get far off locals and had independents like wgn chicago. By the mid 70s wtbs, wgn and other channels came around. I was a teen just in time for MTV! Having 13 channels was the bomb. It filled the whole rotary channel changer. Dont you miss the clickety click of the tuner?
Anyone remember the RFT DAMs? You could install it inline to "test" your cable and the websites used to have a bs legal disclaimer about informing your cable provider when you were testing your cable lol.
Cablenet started in 1981-1982 with the mt prospect il super headend and other towns near it (dual 60-channel). Now a comcast system and I think the master headend for the most of the NW suburbs
@@jaygriz460 They likely just turned off all the scrambled analog pay services for everyone in his area. Those who paid for the channels would be sent a new digital box from the cable company, and those who were pirating them were SOL. As I already said the high piracy rates with these boxes generally meant they were the first to go when a cable plant went digital.
i remember those in the late 90's we use to have to move a scrambler box around on top of the cable box until the cable would pop up. i use to hate when i would rush home to see a show i loved and the channels where gone and i had to rush to re scramble it....
You don;'t have the old jerrold wired cable box. That thing was a beast for getting free playboy. All you had to do was hit 4 & 7 at the same time, then use the tuning dial. Once the box fell on the floor for the 800th time and broke open, you could actually use screw drivers to tune playboy to an actual channel so no more 4 & 7 combo needed. Ah the late 80s.
. . . sorry about all the deleted comments, I wanted to make sure i was posting them in a way so they expand correctly. . . my bad 0:-) . . . youtube keeps making me type in a security phrase now!
Looks like the Scientific Atlanta started with Channel 1. Not sure about the others but come Cable Companies used Channel 1 a strange Channel because the frequency for CATV Channel 1 is between VHF-LO Channels 4 and 5. Also some went to Channel 99 and some went way over Channel 100. But I never knew a cable comp[[any to have channels that high and channels in the 90's I think would be FM Radio band and would get interference from FM Stations.
ONTV was big in the Los Angeles area back in the day, with SelecTV a distant second. I think they eventually merged. It didn't really help, since these services days were numbered from the start. As more and more of the region was wired for cable, they lost more and more subscribers, until they eventually shut down.
(3 of 7) My 8500 receives 2-62, and then skips to 97. if I manually enter a channel in between (like 66), all i get is snow, but not just normal cable-is-unplugged/AGC-is-keying-randomly "SHHHHHHHHHH" snow, rather, it is getting some kind of signal that is having an effect on the horizontal sync. I can hear the flyback buzz change significantly, and the picture looks like an image of snow, but with H-hold turned to an extreme - giving the effect of thick rasters.
LOl,I remember ONTV here in Detroit,my Dad and uncle went to a Radio Shack,they each bought a $20-$25 descrambler box,no subscription necessary, and we had it for like 3 years til Comcast came through.
I made my own Pay TV decoder way back then. It would decode the same RF Pay TV channels as did the Zenith models. The total cost for an individual decoder, was 6 dollars tops. The 1 inch by 4 inch assembled decoder PCB only pulled about 15mA. With that being the case, if you already had a Cable TV box that came with volume control, that meant that you could put my decoded board inside it, and then tap the +12Vdc line for power. Then you just cut the analog video wire that jumps from the units RF Demodulator on over to the RF modulator, and connect the RF Demodulator and the RF modulator to the decoder board instead. Job done. It now decoded every Pay TV channel. It decoded the scrambled channels, line by line, thus there was no PLL(Phase Locked Loop) delay problems. Since there was no delay when you selected a pay channel, there was no way for you to tell if you were watching a pay channel or not, other than by knowing what channel you had selected. Fun days back then.
how did you find out this information back then?
@@nm7781 I was a technician back in those days and worked for a company that manufactured TV Cable Converters. So it was easy to know how the Pay TV scrambled the video at that time by taking a quick peak. Normally you have the video line by line signals each in combination with horizontal sync pulses that are located below the video level, positioned there such that the TV can detect them. To scramble the picture, they had raised the horizontal sync pulses up into the video level such that the TV's could not detect them, hence the TV could no longer be in horizontal sync with the video line signals, and in turn the images looks all scrambled. However, the horizontal sync pulses that are present within each vertical sync pulse, were not touched at all. So I used them to start looking ahead a specific time period from each H-pulse via the use of a time delay IC, to see if the next H-Pulse was in the wrong position, or not. If it was in the wrong position, the circuit would correct the error, and then use this corrected H-Pulse to trigger again the time delay IC to know again when to look for the next H-pulse to see if it too needed correcting. So it thus became a very very simple line by line H-Pulse correction circuit.
lots of wrestling ppv s and free porn from those boxes!!! and movies galore. Those were the days.
Before PPV when we only had Closed Circuit TV.
Hey...now you made me remember seeing Emmanuelle movies on there. Back when hairy wasn't considered scary. Ha ha ha
"On TV" ---Omg, that was part of my childhood!!!! Thanks for posting this!!!
Please, kind sir, never toss those, they're a piece of history that should be saved!
+CutThroatNin3 Keeping them forever.
I agree, don't throw them away.
I love this era of cable, I was fascinated by cable when I was little, which led me to be a cable guy later in life. We didn't have cable at home, but we had it at my grandparents house, and I was notorious for doing something to that woodgrain zenith st-1600 that required calling the cable company. When Media One bought out Continental Cablevision in the late 90s, they came in and replaced the st-1600 with the General Instruments cft-2200, then when I locked that out one day and required a call to the cable company, I was no longer allowed to touch the remote, but got that call from my grandmother when she needed to know how to program her new remote and I was a cable guy :)
I have the CFT-2200 (they have them on ebay for $10-$20 shipped at times), I am getting my st-1600 any day now, and am considering getting a Scientific Atlanta box, as I have dealt with them too where my family had JONES Intercable (never figured out what "intercable" was). I also have a Primestar satellite box, you must remember Primestar was owned by TCI cable, and had a really awesome remote with a grid of multicolored buttons which corresponded to categorized channels sorted by genre.
When I worked as a cable guy, I would collect little bits of history, like really old splitters, tags, notch filters, old remotes or things with old logos, sometimes I would get lucky and someone would pull out all their old literature they had in their endtable for 10+ years and didn't mind parting with in exchange for new guides. Checking by the dumpster at night scored me a few old signs and such after the construction division replaced them with new stuff.
All this stuff is a fascinating history of how we went from something so simple that a 13 year old with soldering skills could break to something that you have to have a strong proficiency in hacking and digital signals to get around, and how the whole feel of cable used to be in your face and "friendly", when it was a serious luxury they were selling. As for having no signal, you should do what I plan to do, build yourself a personal headend using (a) cheap RF modulator(s) and (a) video source(s), like a dvd player or VCR. A fun one would be to get a dirt cheap TV out video card and an old PC and put the weatherstar 4000 emulator program on it, for some good old vintage nostalgia.
Compudude -- if you by some chance receive this notification, would you shoot me an email at maxraphaelgreen@gmail.com ? I am a radio reporter and I'm working on a story about this era of cable, you sound like you'd be an excellent person to chat with
just Googled Weatherstar 4000 EMU, that's cool!
Compudude86, would you be interested in an old Oak industries "econobloc" Model B19? ...it has a knob to select either 2 thru 13 or A thru G, and also has an accompanying fine tuner for the A thru G. It appears to be in great shape for it's age, considering this is probably from circa 1977-79. I have no idea if it works or not, but I've opened it up, and I saw no components that looked scorched, damaged, loose, etc. It was probably just "retired" like so many of these were when better or more compact devices came along. Message me on here if you are interested, we can go from there. Peace!
The test chips were why the scrambled premium channels where typically the first thing that died when cable companies switched an area to digital service, even if the rest of the analog channels were available for several years after. In Toronto for instance the analog scrambled channels all went away in (IIRC) 1999 or 2000 when Rogers introduced digital service and they forced you to get a digital box if you wanted them. I also remember my grandfather would borrow a neighbour's descrambler when there was a movie on he wanted to watch. This worked because these boxes are all dumb receive-only systems and with ZTAC the authorization data to turn boxes on and off (at least on the same headend) was sent as pulses in the VBI so every box and every house would get it.
The last publicly available scrambled analog TV channel (so not counting closed circuit stuff like hospitals and hotels) was probably M-Net in South Africa which kept its Oak Orion system alive until 2018.
We got a Cable box from Continental Cablevision back in 82 or so and it had a manual click dial and a fine tune know to the right. I had lots of fun with that thing. I'd fine tune Cinemax in to a point where the scrambled line would almost shift off the screen to the right or left and try to get my parents to let me watch stuff. Then the line would come back and I'd try to fix it again. After a few times they would tell me to change it. But I did see a few movies for free this way. I love this stuff. I hope to own an original ONTV box someday also to show off to friends.
The local cable company where I live used to use the woodgrain Zenith boxes from the mid-80s up until 2000, when they went digital and started using the Motorola DCT2000 digital cable boxes. Those Zenith boxes were used for Zenith's "Z-TAC" (Zenith Total Addressable Control) CATV scrambling system, which the boxes could actually be addressed and controlled by the cable company to automatically descramble channels that were subscribed to, which also made pay-per-view movies and events possible with this system. It made cable piracy a bit more difficult (although I believe "test" chips were also available for Z-TAC boxes as well, IIRC).
I remember as part of the addressing system Z-TAC used, whenever the converter box was unplugged or unpowered for a period of time, it would lose it's addressable programming by the cable company as to which subscribed channels it was authorized to descramble. As a result, after powering it up, none of the channels would be descrambled or displayed--the converter would just output black video with silence. What you'd have to do then, is to tune in the box to a dedicated channel on the cable TV system for a few minutes to reprogram and reauthorize the converter box (my CATV provider used channel 28, the Discovery Channel was there at the time). I believe the CATV company would insert the programming data in the VBI (vertical blanking interval, where closed captioning and teletext data is also carried in an analog video signal)) of a particular channel (28 in this case) to activate or reactivate a Z-TAC cable box to whichever channels the customer subscribed to.
I was fortunate to live with grandparents who owned one while I was growing up. I watched WWF/WWE pay per views every month. Wish we still had it around
We never had one, but I knew people who did in the 90s. The cable company went on a huge "We will catch you" ad campaign for a period.
I remember my Dad going to the bar and buying what was referred to as a "black box" so we could record Wayne's World off PPV without paying. :P
My old man did the same!! and if i recall the Horse racing channel that they used for Phone Bet would turn into the porn channel after 11pm lmaooo...good times.
Oh my goodness, I have not seen an ON-TV box for over 30 years. That and SelecTV. This is awesome.
My first cable supplier, in 1974, just hooked the cable directly into my TV's antenna input...no set-top box. That was because the cable company offered only 12 channels (2-13). My first cable box (1978) had two channel knobs, labelled A and B. Each knob had channels from 2 to 13, for a total of 24 channels. My second cable box (1980) had a slide bar for channel selection, that gave me a whopping 36 channels. Neither came with remotes.
I vaguely remember the day when these suddenly stopped working, was such a bummer. We had the Sci-ATL one, we had Encore, Showtime, HBO, and I got to watch all the wrestling/boxing ppv's for free throughout the 90's. Wish I could go back in time sometimes and just channel surf. Good times!
We rented the scientific Atlanta box. Funny seeing these years later. A friend gave us a descrambler in the late 90s. We had the normal cable box, but had the add on descrambler where you feed the outside cable line to the add on and the other end to the cable box. Watched all the wrestling and adult channels. 😂
Watched so many WWF, & WCW pay per views with my black box back in the early and mid 90s.
Cellmate 1: What you in for?
Cellmate 2: "I stole cable and pirated Bash At The Beach 96"
Cellmate 1: *Screams loudly* GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU FREAK!" 😂😂😂
Wrestling PPV's. Enough said.
Bret Hart vs Shawn Michaels
WrestleMania 96
@@Thesmokeeffect classic
A retired police officer was making money selling these black boxes in the entirety of the 90s in my town. He made it his mission to sell one to every family in the town lol. Then when these were obsolete due to the rise of comcast/direcTV, he was selling those satellite tv all access cards. I don't know if he was caught.
Before it became an ABC affiliate in the big United States broadcast TV affiliation switch, which began in 1994 and ended in 1996, KNXV-TV 15 was one of the various TV stations that would sign off at night in the 1980s and then air ON TV Pay TV programming that needed to be descrambled with an ON TV box.
Back in my home town, we had a scrambled channel over channel 16. It must have been there from about 1982 to around 1989. I remember being able to pick up the audio on a hand held radio. My parents never subscribed to it, but it was a channel called "STAR movie channel" (no, not Starz)
No one ever remembers it, but it was on C-Band.
I remember my parents having one and I remember cycling thru the channels as a 4 year old then in the late 1990's
Man, Thanks for sharing. On TV, Selec TV and the Z channel in LA during the 80s. Too many good times. We had the Tocom descrambler much later.
1981, we had the box one earlier where we could fold a matchbook in half and stop the knob halfway in between and get HBO for free, and I think MTV was a premium then as well. Cool to see those again...
It wasn't too hard to reverse engineer the signal. The standards, including the waveform, for a normal video signal are published. Being very careful about grounding, using an isolation transformer if necessary, it is still possible to connect an oscilloscope to an older TV set, synchronizing the scope to the TV's vertical oscillator, and observing the video signal. Then, a second TV could be modified to temporarily provide a fixed, adjustable, voltage to its AGC, and tuned to the subscription TV channel. Have the first TV provide the oscilloscope with sync and observe the video waveform on the second TV. Typically, the horizontal synchronizing pulses were suppressed. The pulses could be restored by inserting gain during the horizontal sync interval. A convenient place to insert the gain was in the connection from the tuner to the IF amplifier, using a FET amplifier. You could use the TV set's own horizontal pulse as a timing reference, having it trigger an adjustable one shot, which would trigger a second one shot, which would increase the gain of the FET amplifier. The signal might have trouble locking up but, once locked, would stay locked until interference caused it to unlock.
Some subscription TV stations put a pilot tone on the audio at the horizontal frequency. If you had a UHF to VHF converter with output on channel 6 sitting around, you could connect it to an FM stereo radio, tune in the UHF station's sound at about 88 MHz, tweak the coil for the stereo pilot, and get a mix of program sound and the barker. Connect a speaker between the left speaker "hot" and right speaker "hot", adjust the balance control and you had the program sound. The stereo pilot could be picked off and used as a timing reference for circuitry inserting gain in the TV set.
Zenith had its SSAVI boxes for over the air subscription TV. The SSAVI stood for the method used, Sync Suppression And Video Inversion. The horizontal pulses during the vertical interval were normal but suppressed the rest of the time. Video inversion produced a picture like a photographic negative, but not all the time. Undoing the video inversion was tricky, but could be done. Zenith modified the scheme slightly for its cable TV premium channel boxes, shown in the video.
Zenith used an addressing scheme coded into lines in the TV picture vertical interval. The test chips typically made the address always match and inserted ones in the enable bits. There was a parity bit and some test chips didn't change it, So, about half the time the data was rejected for a parity error but, eventually, the box was enabled for all channels.
Incredibly interesting thanks for providing this information!!
The other Zenith was probably late 90s, in the early 2000's most systems went digital for pay TV. I don't remember any boxes that came out in 2000, they were phasing out analog, the Zenith blocked the audio, too SA didn't! Also, before we got the SA box, we had 13 channels and a box for HBO/Showtime (probably on channel 9X) you turn to channel 4, flipped the box. There were TONS of analog cable boxes but, your demo is spot on
My parents had something called IT SelecTV. There were two channels, A & B. B had dirty movies on at night.
This service went away in the mid 80's. Also remember the box had a 5 digit combination dial for the monthly scramble key which was sent with the bill.
Yep I think my step dad's channel Saud something like time to send your kids to bed
😂
@@charlottejackson7690
I used to pretend I was asleep on the couch. Did the same at grandpas when he tuned to Playboy at 9pm.
Thanks for preserving this bit of history. We had that Scientific Atlanta box to replace an older one that used a separate descrambler which i think was Hamlin brand. The SA addressable box allowed the company to eliminate scrambled channels entirely instead of getting a distorted picture which was way more fun.
I was always fascinated with Cable TV as a youth, especially because I didn't have it growing up. My friends and family had and i was so jealous, but my parents were against paying for TV. I missed out on the MTV and Nickelodeon golden years of the 80s. I also watched alot of WWF in the 80s and 90s and missed out on those cable shows. I learned alot about these descramblers later on. I noticed a few friends had different types of boxes and got most of the channels. I saw the ads in Rolling Stone and Playboy. Once ebay came out it was a marketplace to buy them. I bought a Panasonic VCR that had a built in descrambler around 2003-04, I was very skeptical about this since cable was converting to digital and dvds were taking over. It actually worked to my surprise, some channels had bleeding colors but no way to adjust this. At the time I said, if I had this 10 yrs prior it would have been cooler, so concealed to be built in a VCR.
We had that Scientific Atlanta box when I was a kid - I recognize the remote. Pretty cool to see the innards. Thanks for posting this :)
Back when TV was free and cable was affordable, thanks for the upload and the stroll down memory lane!
We were making these in high school in 1980 using the 565 PLL I think it was. Good times! LOL ;)
We had ON t.v in the early 1980's just like the single choice ON box you have on the bottom of the two ON boxes in your vid here when I was a kid in Chatsworth, CA. After we had ON t.v., we got another service called SELEcT.V., and if I recall, it had 3 choices of pay channels.I also recently acquired an old Oak industries "econobloc" here in North Dakota, and was surprised to discover oak industries had also made our old original ON t.v. box too. There were only a few companies making decoders, traps, descramblers, etc. back in the beginning...cable company monopolization was rampant and it was a cat and mouse game with the FCC. Each time the feds clamped down it was like moonshiners who not only found a way around most of the regulations the FCC imposed, but they even seemed to improve their game. Unfortunately the cable companies also used the regulatory turmoil to their advantage in a rather greedy way and put the screws to the end user. I have to laugh, because I clearly remember the big sales pitch many of those big cable services used to entice more people to buy cable service....it was "commercial free television" Welp, ladies and gentlemen....their profits have been rolling in since the mid 1970's from the money they make from ads on cable t.v., they've covered their running costs a million times over and what did we get for it? ....hmmm, well now we get to pay even more ridiculously higher fees for cable t.v., we get to see almost CONSTANT commercials .......and we get to see their stupid station i.d. badge WITH ADS in the corner of the screen all the time too. Yeah,...so much for "commercial free t.v." ha ha ha
I have the Jerrold Starcom III prototype - with a wax witness lug to prevent opening the box to see the electronics inside - it's immaculate and pretty cool.
In nyc there was a whole side business made from these. How i miss these days
Oddity Archive had done a couple videos on the ON tv subscription tv service back, in fact I have the video he did on the service in my recommended video feed that sits next to the comments section. I think he said that how they managed to pull off the scrambled signal was basically to transmit a 15 hz sin wave to mess with the tv. Edit: and I think he mentioned about how people figured that out and figured out how to get past the 15hz signal and were able to build something out of radio shack parts and were able to get past the 15 hz signal and get the signal clear.
A coworker had a cable box with "test chip" and had friends over to watch a pay-per-view fight on the local cable TV system. Sometime during the program, a message appeared on the screen "You are using an illegal decoder." Apparently, the cable company changed the digital code accompanying the program to something none of its boxes were allowed to receive, and made those screens go blank. After sending the message, the cable company switched the code back, so its viewers didn't really notice anything wrong. The "test chip" boxes let everything through, including the message!
I'm sure some viewers thought that they had been "busted". A few who had invited friends over and had everyone chip in on the cost were probably embarrassed to have to admit that they hadn't paid for the event.
Great info and story!!!
I sure do remember that wooden box! ON-TV was available in Miami, too. As a kid, I caught my first glimpse of it in 1980, when my father had one installed.
My uncle created the first bullet proof box back in the late 80’s to almost 1999 until Time Warner and the feds raided his business. He used to ship us 50 to 100 boxes at a time back in those good old days. And these were the cream of the crop that got all pay per view channels all the time and could not be “zapped”
They were great times, for sure!
It brought me to back in the day...
While commenting, I was going to name drop a Direct TV alternative and decoding locations but found that the DSSrookie website is down. They housed nearly every converter box command codes to train the LMB (think that's the name of those circular parts of a satellite dish) to decipher every channel. I had the Viewsat model and a Direct TV dish.
The knowledge was annoying with satellite codes and Scientific Atlanta quick board installations because of frequent signal disruptions. No one wants to "keep" paying you for your time resetting the system to test mode. Luckily the SA at least had a 40 pin processor that never stopped. Oh the times.
They had ONTV in every state it was Channel 52 in Southern CA Same with SelecTV, ZTV which I think Z was actually a microwave signal
I think you're right. SelecTV was on Channel 22. Between ONTV and SelecTV, ONTV was the easier of the two to descramble. There were kits sold at flea markets to do that. You could receive the station for free, but the signal quality was only fair to poor. Eventually these services vanished, as cable was built out through the region.
@@roachtoasties I made one from a kit mail ordered. What they did was remove the vertical sync signal so the TV would scramble you could hear the voice. The kit I got had a dial that re-created the sync just turn a knob until the sync was correct screen unscrambled. This was also used for large satellite dishes. Later they encrypted the audio lot of microwave receivers restored the sync.
@@Mike-01234 A friend of mine built one. The cabinet resembled a small desk speaker made from wood. I remember the knob to adjust things. The quality of the picture wasn't as good as the real service, but what do expect for free. He eventually gave me the box, but by then the service was on its decline before it eventually shut down.
In Chicago we had Spectrum TV, similar to ONTV, all while fiber was being laid in preparation for something much bigger. I just didn't know what it was at the time. With Spectrum, we had a set top box being fed by an antenna on our roof via coax. We'd just turn to channel 3 to view the content. I was very pleased with one channel. In the South, my aunt had a HBO set top box that also provided one channel. I recall Cinemax being launched which gave you three channels, then came cable. Cable was limited by the infrastructure of that time. Fiber wasn't being utilized so RF signal would travel via coax directly from the central office or the head end to the home which resulted in signal degradation. Fiber was and is the game changer.
I remember my family's first cable box. It was a nougat-colored Hamlin cable box with simulated wood grain on top, plus a lighted strip with channel selection on it. It had a sliding selector underneath the lighted channel strip to select the channel of our choosing, whether it was Nickelodeon, VH-1, Family Channel, MTV, TNN, The Weather Channel, TBS, WGN, etc.
ONTV was successful in Chicago because, at the time, the City was not wired for cable.
imagine someone making a digital tuner with a vintage look of Scientific Altanta, remote and all. Its not impossible. It just hasnt been done yet.
Build my own simple simon descrambler and worked great, even during the antipiracy time, just had a remote to deactivate during the siren period. Pilot less gated sync. Then came Direct TV 1000 channels wide open.
The good ol' days. Oh man. Seen so many great movies back in the day on my cable box. I'm in Canada and I remember at the height of it there was TMN, Moviepix and Viewers Choice. It was awesome!
Nowadays with netflix and all that stuff it's just not the same. You spend more time picking what to watch than actually watching something. Not only just spending time picking, but I also found myself constantly looking up IMDB ratings and reviews before watching. Not what I call relaxing at all. It's a never ending cycle of indecisiveness.
A few months ago I ordered the TMN and HBO package. It's so nice to just turn on the tv and do some good old fashioned channel surfing for movies. It's nice to just catch something on TV and watch it. Feels like 1993 again. It's the healthier choice. lol.
+Tony Giusto programming is more fun when it's scheduled. Now, being on demand, it's too convenient.
Yeah, TV just isnt what it was anymore... I still like to check TMN for a good movie, good times!
oh so many memories of ontv. thank you for showing your collection.
Great video. I worked with the Cablenet system in the early 80's and remember the Zenith Z-TAC boxes. I have a few of the old "wood grain" Zeniths still with even older remotes than you have.
Up until about about January 2018 or so, at least near where my grandparents on my mom's side in cohoes ny, there were still channels that existed that were unscrambled on cable. You read that right, unscrambled cable TV channels in New York, at least cohoes, I think there are a few places that are able to pick up unscrambled cable TV stations. I remember back when I was able to watch cable TV back in the day 24/7, my family (my parents, sisters and I) were able to pick up quite a few channels. If coarse, it wasn't as much as if you had cable or satellite, but you could pick up something of 50/60 channels. granted, most of the time you could pick up channels from 2 to about 75 or 79, but a lot of the time, the amount of channels that were filled in between those 2 channels dropped off after about 52 or 53 or so. you'd see a channel that was active after every 3rd or 4th or so empty channels, give or take, and there was 2 or 3 or so channels I think under channel 30 that were empty. I think it was channel 7, 15 and 16. I forget if those were the exact channels or not, but I think those were the channels.
My granddad had a Pioneer Cable box with a white finish and red led display. It would receive all the channels. The box in the living room ended up with the E4 on the display.
I remember ON TV back in early 1980's I think ON TV was better than this new technology today. I enjoy watching cable TV very much but it's not good enough on the other hand cable repeat the same thing so much; But I was watching You Tube and saw some old ON TV promos and this brought back some good memories to me, this was the original cable TV of it's time.
I had that wood grained Zenith in the early to mid 80's and underneath it was safety Torx screws. First time I had ever seen those screws before. Yes, I got into it more than a few times, lol, returning it to the cable company when I blew it. It was extremely hard to get the safety torx screwdriver back then (pretty much impossible) so I took a T10 or it was a T15 (still have that screwdriver in my toolbox too) and broke the middle out so a plain Torx could work.
Man.... those were the days of cable.
+Willie Turner Good times!
I guess you collect those boxes like I do with old 8 bit computers and still enjoy and practice programming on.
I have had subscription TV and still had the free local television and spent most of my time watching the free television most of the time and decided to drop my subscription and stay with the local TV only.
Thanks for posting this. We had various SA boxes over the years and I'd always wanted to see what was inside and tinker with it. But I never had the Torx security bits. Until now. I'd never seen the inside. Considering how hefty those boxes were, it is surprisingly empty. Never would have guessed. Nice word on the mod chip. That would have been a super hack back in the day. We had a legal version for a while when a family member worked for the local cable company. Employees got every channel except PPV descrambled free as a perk. So we had all the movie channels and even Playboy TV. Good times.
+LS Good times!
All we back in the 1980's was a rented converter & a VCR. Now we have a Shaw HD box which has over 200 channels.
Thank you for making this video. I wasn’t conscious when these were in use. Always wanted to know how they worked. I wonder if they can be adapted for different purposes or up cycled.
The green light Zenith box came out in 1990. The red light box came out around 1992. I had both of them. They had a similar version of that green light box that came out in 1996.
Cable had no way to tell if you had these. They ran some scare tatic commercials trying to fool you but the fact is they didn't know you had one
TELEVISIONARCHIVES This might be my favorite video check this out regarding piracy ruclips.net/video/5HlGBh7B0O8/видео.html
Vintage classic childhood memories.
the green led zenith box came out in 1996. the oak grain zenith is from 1987.
I can remember that the old cable boxes generated a lot of static. I can remember being shocked more than once in operating one manually.
thanks for all the free movies
I think the Zenith system was the most common scrambling method for cable companies back in the 1980's and 1990's. There was also Tocom, Jerrold, Hamlin, and a few others. I wouldn't be surprised if they were pirated the same way that Zenith and Scientific Atlanta were.
Back then we only had channels 02-125.& now over 200 channels from Shaw.
I remember the MAX CHANNELS Being 99 in the late 80's early 90's, 10 yrs later lol
How i remember those decoder boxes when we first got Cable TV in Chicago back in 1985. Even though, the one we got was of a different make.
On TV in Phoenix in the 80s was sent via a microwave signal where you had to mount a mw antenna pointing directly at the source to get the signal so wasn't sent over UHF there.
Lot's of great movies, wrestling and free porn those were the good old days
I remember seeing the black boxes when I was a kid in the 90's I didn't know at the time the black boxes were illegal. My uncle had told me that TV stations at the time use to have a signal and send something through the bullet line to find out who had the cable black box. My uncle did tell me that people use to get busted for having the black box on the antenna or analog TV. I found out 2 years ago that back in the 80's and 90's tv stations use to restrict channels.
Very Retro cool! I'm from the Southside. Regular ch. 44 was ESPAÑOL in Chicago.
I remember in the early 70s when catv actually meant community ANTENNA tv. In Western Arkansas we had a giant 200ft antenna to get far off locals and had independents like wgn chicago. By the mid 70s wtbs, wgn and other channels came around. I was a teen just in time for MTV! Having 13 channels was the bomb. It filled the whole rotary channel changer. Dont you miss the clickety click of the tuner?
LOL I just came across about 150 of the chips I had left over from God knows when.I also found RFT's and "the stick" lol what fun it was
No, cable television did not start to appear until around 1983. Prior to that, ONTV and Sportsvision was only available via the UHF airwaves.
We had cable in the mid 70s
Watched the birth of MTV
August 1 1980
Anyone remember the RFT DAMs? You could install it inline to "test" your cable and the websites used to have a bs legal disclaimer about informing your cable provider when you were testing your cable lol.
Got one for $35 on eBay early 2000s, sadly it unlocked the 2 pay movie channels beyond the existing lineup only.
Since June 12, 2009 Broadcast TV is digital now a days, it was analog back then, but thankfully, it's all different now.
These bring back some fond memories.
Cablenet started in 1981-1982 with the mt prospect il super headend and other towns near it (dual 60-channel).
Now a comcast system and I think the master headend for the most of the NW suburbs
I had my black box all the way up until 2004 before Comcast zapped it. Good times
What happened to it when they zapped it. Back then it was analog how did they even know you had one.
@@jaygriz460 They likely just turned off all the scrambled analog pay services for everyone in his area. Those who paid for the channels would be sent a new digital box from the cable company, and those who were pirating them were SOL. As I already said the high piracy rates with these boxes generally meant they were the first to go when a cable plant went digital.
We on Rogers [30yrs ago]. Today we've been on Shaw for 17yrs.
I’ve built one when I was younger
Brings back memories
Here in Northeast Ohio ON TV aired on the former WCLQ Channel 61--present-day Univision channel WQHS.
Yes I remember this.
i remember those in the late 90's we use to have to move a scrambler box around on top of the cable box until the cable would pop up. i use to hate when i would rush home to see a show i loved and the channels where gone and i had to rush to re scramble it....
You don;'t have the old jerrold wired cable box. That thing was a beast for getting free playboy. All you had to do was hit 4 & 7 at the same time, then use the tuning dial. Once the box fell on the floor for the 800th time and broke open, you could actually use screw drivers to tune playboy to an actual channel so no more 4 & 7 combo needed. Ah the late 80s.
Damn I miss the ole days of not having to pay anything for wrestling ppvs oh da ole days I want back so much lol now all hail kodi
We had this new thing called cable tv with HBO in the early 70's in Buffalo/Amherst NY,wasn't really new,the idea was around for decades.
OTA pay tv also existed in other markets too
i still own a on tv cable box from when my mom had on tv back in the earily 80's in chicago.
Is that cable box grey with buttons on top because I was trying to show someone that one but can't find a picture of it.
+mikemillionaire81 no.its the wooden looking box with one turning knob.blue on tv lettering
There should be bootleg analog tv run by amateur broadcasters out of their garages, like underground pirate tv.
. . . sorry about all the deleted comments, I wanted to make sure i was posting them in a way so they expand correctly. . . my bad 0:-) . . . youtube keeps making me type in a security phrase now!
it wants just in Chicago i remember having ON T.v. in the early 1970's in L.A.
Looks like the Scientific Atlanta started with Channel 1. Not sure about the others but come Cable Companies used Channel 1 a strange Channel because the frequency for CATV Channel 1 is between VHF-LO Channels 4 and 5. Also some went to Channel 99 and some went way over Channel 100. But I never knew a cable comp[[any to have channels that high and channels in the 90's I think would be FM Radio band and would get interference from FM Stations.
yeah!,I remember we had "On TV" way back in the day before "SelectTV" or "HBO"!
ONTV was big in the Los Angeles area back in the day, with SelecTV a distant second. I think they eventually merged. It didn't really help, since these services days were numbered from the start. As more and more of the region was wired for cable, they lost more and more subscribers, until they eventually shut down.
try to find an old cablenet box. remember. It had a key on the left side
(3 of 7)
My 8500 receives 2-62, and then skips to 97. if I manually enter a channel in between (like 66), all i get is snow, but not just normal cable-is-unplugged/AGC-is-keying-randomly "SHHHHHHHHHH" snow, rather, it is getting some kind of signal that is having an effect on the horizontal sync. I can hear the flyback buzz change significantly, and the picture looks like an image of snow, but with H-hold turned to an extreme - giving the effect of thick rasters.
I didn't see any SelecTV boxes, they were ONTV's competitors at the time.
LOl,I remember ONTV here in Detroit,my Dad and uncle went to a Radio Shack,they each bought a $20-$25 descrambler box,no subscription necessary, and we had it for like 3 years til Comcast came through.