At 14 May 2008 16:28:09 -0700 William Souden wrote:

> Agreed. At one time you had to rent everything from the phone
> company. They also charged monthly fees for things like an extension
> phone on the same line.

Yeah, I remember as a kid we had one phone that rang and two extensions
that didn't (that we weren't paying for.) My Dad worked for the local gas
company and he and his co-workers would pinch any phones left behind when
they were sent to shut off the gas at abandoned apartments (if they beat
the phone company guys there, of course.) Then they'd disconnect the
ringers so the phone company wouldn't detect the extra load from the
extension phones.

I remember having a heck of a time convincing my folks when I was a
teenager in the 80's that you were allowed to own phones and it was okay to
let me reconnect the ringers! (And an ever bigger sell-job to get them to
turn in the stupid banana-yellow wallphone they'd been renting since the
Nixon administration!)

> Now that I think of it the cable people used to charge for a second
> tv getting basic cable.

My cable co was even worse. In addition to the $6/month extra outlet, we
signed up for "cable radio" for $2/month extra when the cable company first
came to town back when I was 12 or 13 years old. (They rebroadcast local
FM stations, as well as MTV's and HBO's audio in stereo, on unused radio
frequencies for people in bad reception areas.) The installer put a $2
cable splitter on the line and was about to run a wire to the stereo's FM
antenna terminals. I told my parents to tell the installer they changed
their minds and didn't want the radio service, and we ran to Radio Shack
later and bought the necessary parts to "roll our own." (We did get a
knock on the door several months later when they detected a "leak" caused
by my jury-rigged extra-outlet cable run to my brother's bedroom. As a
precocious teen, no one had told me I wasn't supposed to use a leftover
piece of 300-Ohm antenna twin-lead wire with coax adapters on the ends as a
cable line! ;-)


> When they were forced to stop the practice they warned people about
> imaginary hazards of hooking up a second tv on your own (they are
> allowed to charge for doing the cabling).
And for box rental, of course- back in the good old days, cable-ready TVs
were still a rarity. I remember trolling garage sales and flea markets
for old converters because my folks didn't want to rent any additional
boxes at $6/month. For a buck each out of a flea market junk box I scored
an old cable-to-UHF converter (upconverted the cable band to UHF channels)
and a very old 36-channel converter with a "remote"- a 12-button panel
(with a three-position switch to select which group of 12 channels you
wanted to select from) on a 20' cord that connected to the actual converter
hooked to the TV!

Ah, the good old days... ;-)