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Comment by gist | Hacker News Reader

To those not old enough to remember, yes tv sets looked like that and there was usually only one, maybe two tops in any given house. I remember that the big event of the decade entertainment wise was when my family got a Sony Trinitron Color TV. Boy was that nice compared to black and white.

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In a weird coincidence, I watched the movie "Network" (1976) with my wife & kids last night, none of whom had ever seen it. They liked it. It didn't even feel very dated, despite the fact that the televisions all looked like the one in this picture. The complexity of the dialogue in the movie astonished us. More was expected of the audience back then.

One of the strengths of Network is the lack of music. In fact if I remember correctly the opening scene is just the camera moving through a newsroom with ambient sound.

Music can date a film badly.

True. It's also very hard to overcome the temptation to put in too much of it to prop up scenes that the director/producer/editor isn't sure about.

I'm sure you can find lots of bad and shallow movies released in 1976 (e.g. a rather bad remake of King Kong) though there were also a number of good films in addition to Network (All the President's Men, Taxi Driver, Rocky). Network was particularly good though and seems rather prescient today.

> More was expected of the audience back then.

The following year Star Wars was released, so I guess 1976 was the last year of movies with complex dialogue. :)

Or maybe, instead, there has always been a wide range of dialogue complexity in films.

you mean it wasn't watered down for the lowest common denominator like the user interfaces of today?

edit: to clarify, I do not mean things like accessibility, I mean "beautiful" user interfaces that are frustrating for power users. just a sideways rant.

And to those not older enough ;), I remember that on Thursday nights (there was a famous quiz show on television) my grandmother invited the neighbours (which had not a TV set at all) to come and watch it together (it was a house with four apartments). And then I remember the surprise when the first colour TV sets came into use (at first they were only in bars and similar), the first main event were the Olympic Games of 1976 (Montreal) all the people crowded there to see the grass (more or less) green, the water blue ...

    all the people crowded there to see the grass (more or
    less) green, the water blue

These days it's the water that's green: http://www.nbcolympics.com/news/rio-officials-drain-green-wa...

God man you could feel those colors I remember that.

Oh honey, he's teasing you. Nobody has two television sets.

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