My Uncle’s remote control.

I grew up in the sixties with black and white TV, we only had the 3 big network TV channels, before UHF came around. When the President came on the tube it was a sad night for us kids, it meant no Bonaza or Red Skelton because he would be on all three channels at once. When UHF started in the mid sixties it was a big thing, they were low budget stations with mainly fuzzy local programs, but there was something more to watch and we were happy.

My uncle invented his own early version of a remote around 1963, well before the rest of the TV viewers did. He would sit in his easy chair about 3 feet in front of the set, next to the chair was a short cane pole that he had modified the tip to slip onto the volume knob, when a commercial came on he would slip the tip of the pole on the volume knob and turn off the sound.

Color TV sets started coming out in the later part of the sixties, I think we got our first one in the late sixties, it was a big deal in the neighborhood, many of the neighbor kids came by to marvel at the new color picture. It also came with a fancy “Remote control.”

As our world becomes more wired lets look back and see how we got to our “4G, 3000 channel, tablet, I-Phone, High Speed, DVR life.

Speech - 200,000 years ago.

Symbols - 30,000 years ago

Writing - 7,000 years ago

Alphabet - 2000BC

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