Cable, Satellite, TV Availability

I guess this is for us older folks, but I would love to hear from all ages.

When did cable and/or satellite television become available in your area? I'm curious if my experience was typical or different because I lived in a small and rural area. Didn't purchase cable until 1995 although it was around long before that.

I remember dishes around here as soon as the mid-'80s.

Thanks.

 

I checked into this for a story I was working on (the one I have in the Workshop) set in '79, because my memory works rather loosely for details. It was very hard to determine when cable really 'came out'—apparently it started as a local thing in some cities sometime in (I think) the 70's. Crap, once again, the details have slipped. Microwaves also were impossible to pinpoint. I was amazed to learn that a Radar Range was an early form of microwave, and that large oven-sized models were available in like the 40's or maybe 30's? I better check my notes, I'm afraid I'm screwing this all up. But my memory was correct that the small, tabletop microwaves became widely available in the early 80's, really the late 70's but they were still pretty expensive and most people didn't have them yet.

Sorry, went a bit off-topic there, but still in the ballpark. (Hey, I just realized how appropriate a ballpark metaphor is considering who I'm speaking to! )

Oh, I meant to say ion my area (a mid-large satellite town of St Louis, but across the Mississippi in Illinois) most people started getting cable in the early 80's, some probably the very late 70's. I know many of my friends had it by '82 when MTV went on-air. But my family was like yours, we didn't get cable until a few years later.

Edit—Aaaaaannnd now I can't find those notes. But if you search for 'cable TV timeline' or something similar you'll find it. I remember Wikipedia had nothing, but I did find a bunch of dedicated sites about it. You may well have already done this and come in here to try to clear up the confusion (I see now that the small local 'cable' stations began in the '30's! )

 

Thanks to you both.

We bought our first VCR in 1986. My first computer was an Apple IIc which was a Christmas present in 1985.

On his Something to Wrestle podcast, WWE's Bruce Prichard once mentioned how much of a hassle it was to order a pay-per-view in the 1980s. Cable company had to send a guy out to prepare everything so your system would receive the show.

Nowadays you can watch the WWE Network on your phone.

 

Ok, found those notes. They weren't in a computer folder but my little pocket notebook. Still a bit confusing, but I see that HBO and a few of the other stations that became the big boys of Cable began as local stations in certain cities. But basically, Cable as we know it hit the air in the very early 80's possibly in some areas the very late 70's.

I also researched VHS, and surprisingly (to me anyway) it was around in the early 70's in Japan, released to the general public in Japan in '76, and came out in the US in '77.

 

That's awesome. Thank you.

 

When I resumed at Texas A & M after the navy, in fall of 1980, we had cable tv. That was in Bryan/College Station. Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin all had cable. It was not really an unusual thing.

My grandfather had satellite tv back then, too. That was on a farm in Oklahoma although satellite was not common. One of my uncles talked him into getting it.

 

Thank you, KiraAnn. I appreciate it.

The first time I remember experiencing cable was in the autumn of 1981. My parents went to see some friends in Cedar Falls (home to the University of Northern Iowa ) and they were watching a football game featuring Syracuse.

Well, we only got one game a week and it usually featured Big Ten teams. To see Syracuse play blew my 11-year old mind.

 

Im a 90's baby, but I dont remember cable or satellite tv until at least 2003ish (when my brother and i would fight over the remote).

I think we MUST have gotten a satellite in italy because i remember cartoons. I especially remember 2 VHS tapes my dad brought back from the US, that he video recorded Nickelodeon cartoons on it for us to watch, so obviously there was cable somewhere. Other than that, we got everything from Blockbuster or the library.
When we came back to the states and lived with my grandparents for a while before we moved into our house, they didnt have cable. So i watched a lot of documentaries, soap operas, reruns of I Love Lucy and Bewitched and the Partridge Family. Morning cartoons aired on saturdays. After school on weekdays were educational cartoons like Cyber Chase, Victory's Kids, Sagwa, Arthur, and Dragon Tails.
-sighs- i miss those days....

I was very uncultured (or outdated) by the time we got cable...kids at school didnt let me forget it.

 

I don't know J.T., those shows you watched before cable make you pretty cultured in my book. That's some awesome stuff.

 

Where I grew up, dishes were mostly for rich people because it was way more expensive, this was the mid 90s. They also weren't the small, house mounted ones they have now, they were huge and were on a pole in the lawn. I'm not sure when cable got to the area that I grew up because it was already there when we moved there in 1987, I'm certain because my dad has told me we used to watch MTV and VH1, which are both on cable. We didn't get broadband until at least 2002 though.

 

Had cable as early as 1980 when we moved to Hawaii.

We had this bad boy.

 

Thanks newjerseyrunner.

I remember during my teenage years on the farm there were several families with huge dishes which looked like they were designed to pick up BBC Mars instead of MTV.

 

That's awesome, Wreybies.