Yeah which explains my hair in those days

It's been about 20 years since I watched cable/broadcast TV in my home. But yeah way back tvs didn't have inputs for other devices, instead you had a box which you put in between the antenna or cable signal and your device which basically over wrote channel 3(why channel 3? I have no idea) with whatever your device was out putting. So if you wanted to play Nintendo you would change to channel 3 and see Mario or metroid.

This guy olds.

This. This is how old. OP needs to get off my lawn.

There it is!

I miss your waterbed too.

LOL. That's not a picture of our actual VCR, just one of the same model.

But, my dad was an aircraft mechanic. He knew his way around tech well enough. Our clocks were always set correctly, as it happens.

Also, the TV didn't just send the currently-tuned channel 'down' the chain, it also allowed connected devices to inject their own, synced, video back into the TV, so you could be watching a show on BBC1, say, and the VCR could overlay a box in the top-right corner letting you know it had started a scheduled recording off Channel 4. Or, if you used a device like a Selectavision, if you tuned into a scrambled channel the Selectavision would notice, decode it, and send the descrambled version back up to the TV, all without the user realising it. Those clever Frenchies.

I had an old small tv like that in my bedroom. There was a dial for vhf and another for UHF. The two UHF channels we had were about 20 and 31, but I found if I dialed it all the way to 90 or so sometimes I could hear voices talking to each other. Usually just boring phone calls, I showed my friends once and we listened to my friends uncle on a call by chance, he recognised the voice and the people he was talking about.

Then they switched mobile phones to a digital signal.