Grand Avenue by Mike Thompson for October 19, 2011

The first remote control, the Zenith Space Command, appeared in 1956. It had four functions: on/off, volume on/off, channel up and channel down. That means she’s at least 55 years old.

No it doesn’t. Just because it was invented doesn’t mean everyone had it. We got our first color TV around 1970 and our first remote control was around the late 70s. When you only had 4 channels including PBS you didn’t really need a remote.

In 1982 when my daughter was a baby we had a small B&W with no remote because thats what we could afford at the time.

Kate really should buy a better TV than that!

Dang I’m getting old. I remember no color, no remote, no cable, had rabbit ears with the old twist knobs to change channels. Oh and we had 6 channels 4 of them ABC, NBC, CBS & PBS no Fox

My Godparents had one of the Zenith’s with a remote. It worked by sound. When you pushed down (a very hard spring loaded button), a hammer struck a tuning fork like bar. The sound caused the TV to up channel one channel and UHF only counted as 1. If you had multiple UHF channels, you had to move the second dial by hand. A second button was for volume and off/on. To turn it off, you had to cycle volume all the way up then off.

I assumed she was using the metaphorical we and not the personal and literal we.

We had that Zenith with the tuning fork remote. The manual channel switch had a chain driven gear on its shaft and it turned a clunky channel at a time. You had to push the up/down button once per channel. But the buttons didn’t wear out like the new ones do.

My sis had to buy a new one because my old college TV broke down, but she didn’t go fot he most expensive one, goes without saying.

The first remote I owned was for my VCR and it wasn’t really a remote as it was attached to the VCR by a long cable.

I’m younger than that, and I remember having a TV with 3 channels, including PBS and no channel changer. There were 4 channels, we just didn’t get one of them.