You Know You Are Old When

   / You Know You Are Old When #4,151  
Back when I was married I asked the wife if she knows how to change a tire, she said yes, I said ok, show me. She didn't

know how. I instructed her and made here take off her tire and put it back on.
 
   / You Know You Are Old When #4,152  
Back when I was married I asked the wife if she knows how to change a tire, she said yes, I said ok, show me. She didn't

know how. I instructed her and made here take off her tire and put it back on.
If I tried to "instruct" my wife how to change a tire and "make her take it off and put it back on", I would have a tire iron bent over my head.
 
   / You Know You Are Old When #4,153  
TI-99s are very rare. I'm assuming you meant TI-99a. If you had a true TI-99, you should have kept it. :)
Good question! Honestly, I'm not sure. I just looked it up, and I see only the 99/4A was beige, and memory tells us ours was beige. But it also says that model wasn't released until 1983, and I was pretty sure we got ours before that.

Putting a TV antenna in an attic.🤔🤔🤔. I was middle age before I heard of doing such. We always had it mounted on a metal pole, and usually with a pipe wrench hanging from it for turning. “No no, to far, turn it back the other way!” my Dad would shout. 😆
I grew up living in an historic district, where there were regulations on what could go on the outside of these houses, so that may be why dad had our antenna in the attic. I honestly don't remember his reasoning, but it seemed like a good idea, so I replicated that when I got my own place. Only difference was that my place had a carriage barn out back, so I mounted the antenna in there with an amplifier, and ran the feed 150 feet back to the house.
 
   / You Know You Are Old When #4,154  
I had a satellite TV dish in the late 80s. It was 10 ft in diameter and had a big slow electric over hyd cylinder on it. There were only a couple of channels on each satellite so you had to remotely signal the dish to move for the next couple of channels. We lived out in the desert at the time with piss poor UHF signal.
Sunday football was always a full house and they brought free beer and chips. Good times.
 
   / You Know You Are Old When #4,155  
Funny story: When I bought my first house in my early 20's, I was too poor to even consider cable. Heck, I didn't even have any fully-functional TV's, they were all hand-me-downs with various deficiencies. One without sound, another without UHF... you get the idea.

So, I head to Radio Shack to buy a reasonably good antenna, as my house was well-located near the top of a south-facing hill, about 40 miles north of Philly. Despite the distance, I figured I'd actually pull in a few stations clear enough to at least see the news. I was working full time + part time school + renovating the old Victorian house, so there wasn't much time for sitting and watching, anyway.

It just happened that Radio Shack was discontinuing several of the antennas at the time, since cable companies were stealing all of their antenna sales, and they had this absolute monster of an antenna on sale for the same price as the more modest one I had planned to buy. If I recall, the thing had a wing span of 16 feet, and an overall length around 30 feet. It looked like a damn ultralight aircraft.

So, I bring the monstrosity home, and set it up in the attic of my carriage barn. It literally filled the whole attic, you had to crawl under and around it, just to get up there and access anything. Comically huge thing. But... I found I was able to pull in channels from Baltimore up thru NYC! The Philly stations were so clear, they might as well have been on cable, whereas the Baltimore and NYC stations were a little grainy (like what I had expected for local channels). I had access to almost as many channels as if I'd paid for cable, but for free.

Eventually, the thing took a lightning strike, which blew out every connected device in the house and barn. After that I had no TV, until my wife moved in and signed us up for cable. :D
I had the largest combo VHF-UHF Winegard made on a rotor and got over 60 stations here years ago. We're on top of a hill, mounted to one chimney. I used coax & a booster and like you could pull in Baltimore to Charlotte.
Neighbor had a "West Virginia state flower" satellite dish right on the property line. A few years ago I asked if I could haul it off which I did. Just a huge blob of kudzu, honeysuckle, etc. He's lazy. I heard him telling someone "sure looks nice since WE cleaned the yard up". "We???" I hollered back. "Do you have a mouse in your pocket?".
 
   / You Know You Are Old When #4,156  
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   / You Know You Are Old When #4,157  
My mom taught me how to change a tire... just sayin. 😛 Oldest daughter has changed a tire about half a dozen times. Wife would call me or a tow truck. Whichever way they chose, the tire still gets changed. ;)

Mom taught me to chain up in the snow...

Mom grew up in snow country and Dad grew up in sunny California.

Where there is a will there is a way.
 
   / You Know You Are Old When #4,158  
It's sometimes hard to remember the absolute crap you could produce, and still earn viewers, when you had a captive audience and only 3-4 stations available. :p
Now you can just go onto Youtube and see lame videos that somehow earn viewers. :rolleyes:
(Antenna on my roof is how my TV gets its signal.)
Was always under the impression you lived waay out in the boonies. Surprised you get any OTA tv. Even here can't get anything but a neighboring state's PBS station.
Putting a TV antenna in an attic.🤔🤔🤔. I was middle age before I heard of doing such. We always had it mounted on a metal pole, and usually with a pipe wrench hanging from it for turning. “No no, to far, turn it back the other way!” my Dad would shout. 😆
Same here. Then again, my parents' house had a metal roof so it wouldn't have worked anyway. :rolleyes:
Initially, they had multiple (single-channel) antennas aimed in different directions (we'd have to select one with a switch next to the tv). Later, about the time I entered high school they replaced it with a broadband antenna on a rotor. All were on the roof on a fairly tall pole...tall enough to need guy wires, so manually turning it was not really an option.
 
   / You Know You Are Old When #4,159  
Was always under the impression you lived waay out in the boonies. Surprised you get any OTA tv. Even here can't get anything but a neighboring state's PBS station.
I do live waaayy out in the boonies.

But...the one big difference between where you live and where I live is mountains - very high mountains - and lack of tree cover. Many years ago radio/TV repeaters were installed on the mountain summits and as long as there is a clear line of site to the mountain, TV reception is great. The mountain directly behind my house is over 5,000 feet - essentially a mile - higher in elevation than my house. "Local" TV stations in northern Nevada all originate in Reno; those stations have repeaters on a mountain almost 11,000 feet in elevation.

When your signal is coming from 1 - 2 miles higher than you are, reception is no problem. Last place I lived my TV signal came from a mountain 140 miles to the west!

Relay antennas on one of our mountains:
IMG_0305ecrtbn11-12-24.jpg
 
   / You Know You Are Old When #4,160  
Youngest of three boys...

So I was the "motor" outside adjusting the antenna...

And I was the inside "remote" for changing the TV between the 3 available channels.
 

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