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[Big-E]

My family was like the only ones that didn't have one. Also knew people who stole satellite signals.

 

[MrCunningham]

oh yeahhhh
I remember this giant wired remote control but I don't remember the cable box though

My parents had the faux wood paneled switchbox on the right when I was growing up. It was the device that allowed me to watch awesome R-rated movies as a kid.

 

[Amagon]

You can't just drop a GIF of that. You have to share the full audio-visual experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1NKoMNy5bY

This is so 80's!

Reminds me of the "Black Sunday" kill that DirecTV orchestrated.

Legendary

 

[PhoncipleBone]

Reminds me of the "Black Sunday" kill that DirecTV orchestrated.

Holy crap. That is awesome.

 

[Takuan]

The black box was the reason why I discovered "mute" was not really truly muted on my TVs. It was really low, but sound was still audible if it was quiet enough.

One can guess what I was watching when I found that out.

 

[Stereogatari]

Reminds me of the "Black Sunday" kill that DirecTV orchestrated.

Very cool. They should have hit the kill switch during the SuperBowl, I suppose that was their nice gesture though.

The "Cat&Mouse" thing reminded me of the PSP scene at its height.

 

[Particle Physicist]

Reminds me of the "Black Sunday" kill that DirecTV orchestrated.

Oh wow, that is pretty awesome!

 

[smurfx]

a neighbor had one and we used to watch wcw ppv's.

 

[Sanjuro]

Real talk.

Who remembers this?

 

[SummitAve]

Our cable box outside was in the far corner of our lot being taken over by the vegetation surrounding a pond. We used to just steal that shit straight up from the source.

 

[robot]

Free PPV and Spice - good times.

Then we got Direct TV and they started selling cards that had all channels unlocked. That was even better.

EDIT: Oh shit, reading that Black Sunday article now, I sorta remember this.

 

[Not a Jellyfish]

I had a friend who's family had one of these, it was awesome.

 

[Cindres]

In the UK we used to have ITV digital, the box would work by sticking this credit card sized card into it, and that thing determined your channels. Crafty fuckers figured out pretty quickly how to distribute dodgy ones that gave you all the channels, and ITV digital would eventually go bust (i seem to remember because of this, I think).

 

[ActuallyHulk]

I never had a black box but watching scrambled porn was quite a favorite pass time of mine back in the day.

 

[agenttoff]

Never had a cable blackbox, but I did have a Directv box and card reader/writer to program my own cards. Unlocked absolutely every channel, including the PPV's. Those were the days! I actually just threw away the card programmer the other day, as I was decluttering and going through old boxes.

 

[Darth Pinche]

Man. I remember all this stuff.

I remember when Cable came into the house and couldn't be split into different signals so you'd have one Cable box that would feed to every TV and you'd have to watch the same thing on every TV. We even had a special rabbit eared box to send the signal upstairs instead of running more cable.

Those were tough times.

Yup we had one of those transmitters too. It would make a mini broadcast to a UHF channel of what ever was on the transmitter. I am sure the FCC killed these.

Anyone remember these? A cable box with ONE channel only. I think this turned into HBO, but I may be wrong. We had this for a while.

 

[Imbarkus]

Real talk.

Who remembers this?

Dammit Man so Pavlovian...

 

[abadguy]

Course i remember it! It's how i watched porn!

 

[CaptainSlow]

Had a friend on the block growing up and they had one of these. Watched so many WWE PPV's in the 90's and loved sleeping over so I could watch the Playboy Channel.