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Comment by katzgrau | Hacker News Reader

At about the age of 14 I somehow came into ownership of 5" black and white TV. I wasn't allowed to have a TV in my bedroom, but this thing probably looked useless to my parents so they didn't say anything.

Little did they know, while they were at work, I went up into the attic and ran a coaxial cable from a splitter down into my room and into the back of the VCR, all neatly tucked behind my desk. I spliced an old mono 1/8 jack onto an RCA component for the video (ext.ant to VCR) and did a similar splicing for the audio, but I had to run it through an old 8 track player to amplify the audio. It may be obvious that I collected a lot of old junk and cables (I still do).

I did this all so I could primarily watch Conan O'Brien... which was available on channel 4 anyway (accessible via antenna) but I just wanted to watch the show in the highest definition possible.

Having my first kid soon, I'm curious if he'll be as determined to work around the rules.

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When I was 14, my dad got us dialup internet in 1994. At the ISP, I had never paid more attention in my life, and when we got home I rushed to install the tcp software and 'internet in a box' for windows 95. My dad got irate at how quickly I was moving through it and told me that he wouldn't help me fix it after I messed it up.

When he came down an hour later and I was transfixed with the primordial web, he gave me a deadly serious warning - that he had a report he could run on the computer to list everything I was visiting. I was dubious. So I proved to myself that he didn't.

18 months later I was working at the ISP. I always wonder if that threat by him to avoid smut and bomb making was a deliberate seed being planted, or just a panicked father veneering over a complete loss of control.

So many memories. I remember riding my bike to the local ISP's office to get my internet welcome packet. Because I wasn't going to wait 5-7 business days for it to arrive in the mail. It came complete with a dozen floppies for Mac and PC, account details, and the Internet Yellow Pages. Which is sitting on a shelf in my parents garage.

At the dawn of the public internet there were no call centers or AOL discs. It was some local guy with enough scratch to afford a T1 and a bank of modems.

The memories indeed! We had a T1 and a pile of Livingston Portmaster 2e terminal servers, connected with a centrex hunt group to a single dialup phone number.

I learned a lot about people very quickly. As we got more popular, we started to get busy signals, because we couldn't grow our hardware fast enough - and then people learned how to do keepalives, so that they wouldn't get stuck offline on a busy signal. That was a race to the bottom. Sharing a physical resource like a phone port is a dark ages thing I am glad we no longer contend with.

We have it much, much better than we did back then.

But I'd still like to go on a time-vacation to enjoy the selection bias of the times - I'm glad we made the Internet easy enough for everyone to get online, but it would be neat to visit 25 years to visit the greener pastures of old.

LOL. I was one of those keepalive hackers. Once I discovered newsgroups and IRC I'd leave the line up to download while I was at school. Downloading a single MP3 over 19.2kbps took the better part of a day.

I remember discovering MP3s. My computer at the time could run Winamp and play music, but not do anything else (like web browsing) at the same time.

I remember learning about the existence of the Internet from encountering a local ISP's kiosk in the mall in 1995. They had an ISDN line serving the kiosk, and as long as I didn't outright block anyone from trying the Internet out they didn't mind me sitting there and surfing. That was also when I discovered the concept of emulation, and I feel I was very fortunate to have been able to had my first experiences with both concepts simultaneously.

> At the dawn of the public internet there were no call centers or AOL discs.

In some areas - probably. Here in Phoenix, I got the internet in 1993 - dialup shell access - from Internet Direct.

Yes - that Internet Direct.

Do you remember netcom.com? https://web.archive.org/web/19981212031322/http://www.netcom... I got dialup access from them in 1992 or 1993 after college. My first access to the Internet was in 1988 via https://web.archive.org/web/19970628122429/http://www.csupom... (Of course that was before the www. Everything was via telnet, ftp and gopher.)

In the DC area in the 80’s, there was a system called Super TV that broadcast adult entertainment at ~900 MHz. I believe they removed the vertical sync, in addition to requiring a UHF dish and tuner.

Anyway, as a kid, I found you could take an old B&W set with the fine tuning knob, and set it between channel 87 & 88, then manually get a few seconds of restored sync by twiddling the fine tuning.

Used that same TV on my C64, and few years later, the same TV could be used to eavesdrop on AMPS cell phones. Versatile devices.

He will. Kids try to find loop-holes in every single rule, and they will deliberately misinterpret everything you say in order to use it against you later on. :)

I don't know why you've added a smiley, my 2 year old is already displaying the trait grr :(

Simply because I can afford the luxury of looking back at it in the rear-view mirror. :)

Yes I got that.

Ps how did you make your 2nd smiley so smug? :P

Wait till he's 14 and you find his bong.

Considering it's not legal up here in Canada, there's a chance kids find their parents' bong when trying to hide theirs.

I think you meant "not illegal"

Indeed!

I don't have a kid, but I recall one of my nieces friends went to the kitchen. We turned around and asked if she needed anything and she said "oh I'm just getting some food for the group." We nodded and went back to our conversation. In the corner of my eye, I realized she was scrounging up chocolate/candy. I sort of shrugged and thought, well technically that is food.

When my daughter asks me "Daddy, can you <something>", I usually reply with "Yes" and then leave it at that. Then should responds with "WILL you <something>", and I do it. I very clearly taught her the difference between can and will by doing so. And now she does the same thing to my wife. And I get in trouble for it. It's great.

May I humbly suggest training her to say "Will you please ..."?

We actually do teach her to use please. It just wasn't part of what I was talking about. :)

What's the point of that "lesson"? In English and many other languages politeness in asking for something is achieved by beating around the bush. That's just how it works.

"Could you do me a favor and look into that issue?". Answering yes implies you'll do it. Same goes for the "woulds" and "cans" and "mind doing ... s".

They two different questions. One is asking if you are you able to, the other if you are willing to. I don't teach my daughter to correct people outside the house, but I do want her to speak properly when out there.

It's the same as everyone knows what she means when she says "libary", but I correct her to pronounce it "library".

Pragmatically, neither of them is a question: they are more and less polite requests (or a request and an order). Your daughter is perceptive enough to have worked this out; probably you did too, but at some point decided to override your unconcious competence with concious nitpicking.

This sort of thing drove me insane in elementary school and still does to this day. In vernacular English, "can you" is just a more polite and less aggressive form of "will you". Having those two options is really useful. Distinguishing between them like that always feels more like a power play by someone trying to force someone else to use an arbitrary phrasing, rather than an actual lesson in how English works.

Well, different kids are different. It was a lot of work, but eventually I convinced my kid that a) we were on the same team so rules were more for everyones' quality of life than just harassment, b) I knew more than they did so my feedback on what they should do was useful to them, and (importantly) c) "rules lawyering" was just as risky as simply breaking rules.

That's a phase. And it's more annoying when the parent teach the child how to argue and value discussions as a mean to solve conflicts or find a solution to problems. So,... sometimes it's really annoying :).

Ha.

I did something similar, also to watch late night comedy.

However, I used two 300 to 75 ohm converters and speaker cable to connect with a splitter to the TV.

I remember proving my father and RadioShack salesman wrong about the proper adapter needed to go from 3.5mm mono to the female coax connector.

I recently bought two 5” black and white portable TVs at a flea market for $5 total.

One of them does have a video input.

You had speaker cable?

My friend and I did something like that to get cable to his room. He lived in a double-wide, his bedroom in the back, and the cable was in the front. We scrounged.

Came up with an adapter here, wire there, and some cellophane tape. Oh, and some thumbtacks.

Some of the wire was speaker cable, the rest was telephone cord. A pair of scissors, some cutting and splicing and taping and tacking - we had it ran.

Other than a very janky signal (gee - why's that?) - he had cable TV. We then proceeded to wire up his stereo to the TV (because we wanted better sound for the Sega Genesis, dangit!). In the end somehow it all worked, and didn't burn his mother's home down.

A month later his older brother saw what we did, and ran a proper run of coax under the trailer, and cleaned up our stereo/tv mess.

I'm curious what the VCR in your room was for if you weren't allowed a TV in there?

It was hidden and used as a signal converter is my understanding.

And that was back when you couldn't type "antenna to rca" into Google and get all the information you could ever want.

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