Must...Watch...TV
At midnight on Feb. 17, 2009, the rabbit ears and the rooftop antennas that still guide television signals into nearly 1 of every 5 American homes will be rendered useless — unless they are tethered to a new device, including two versions unveiled yesterday, that the government will spend as much as $80 a household to help families buy....
To ensure that uninterrupted access to free, over-the-air television does not pose a financial hardship for viewers, a government agency ... will issue $40 gift cards to consumers who want to buy the converters so they are not left behind when television as we have always known it goes dark in early 2009. [emphasis mine]
Read more: Converters signal a new era for TVs
I remember first hearing about this back in my salad days on Lake Ave. As I recall, I shook my head and thought, people will never go for that. They won't go out and buy new equipment just to watch TV. There'll be a mass rejection of television.
Ahh, what I wouldn't give to step in my TARDIS and go back in time to thwonk myself in the head.
Such naivete.
posted by Christine Borne at 12:15 PM
5 Comments:
Don't feel bad -- I remember the days when if you wanted pictures on the internet you had to download them by FTP. Or make them using ASCII art.
Anyway, back in the days when the internet was white text on a black screen, someone told me about this thing called the World Wide Web -- pages with pictures that one viewed in a browser.
I shook my head and thought 'What a crazy idea. Who wants to sit around waiting for pictures to appear. It'll never catch on.'
I remember thinking that as well...this was a sort of "glory days" period in my life, where I didn't have a TV or the Internet (actually, this was so long ago now, I don't think I'd ever really used the Internet). I remember my life being calmer and full of reading and music and cooking and walks by the lake.
But it still totally disgusts me that my government is willing to help people buy TVs, so that they don't "undergo too much financial hardship." Are people really buying this? I mean, "oh, gee, thanks, President Bush...you wouldn't help me get that kidney surgery but thanks for the new TV...."
We can't have universal health care, but by God, we won't have to miss old reruns of Hogan's Heroes.
I'm going to be saving this quote.
I love reminiscing about old technology. I can't wait for my friend's daughter to grow up so I can start in with the "when I was a kid" lines.
I feel old when I realize that today's 2nd graders never knew life without Nintendo OR the World Wide Web. I can't imagine how my life would've been different if the internet had been in the '80s what it is today. Or even in college.
Even so, it's kinda fun to wist about the old AOL "downloading artwork, please wait" dialog box and the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man, and the era when Chuck E. Cheese was chock-full of arcade machines and geared toward tweens rather than toddlers.
And let's not forget playing Oregon Trail on a green screen Apple //e!
Just what America needs, the government subsidizing couch potatoes. For the record 80s technology was awesome! I loved Atari and Nintendo. Video games these days are too realist, like watching a movie. They require no imagination. We used to watch a box shoot another box and love it!
i'm with you, ladonna - i loved being a box shooting another box. that was good enough for me. i used to wonder why old people didn't "get with the times" - now i'm starting to understand....
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