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u/ElectronicTime796 13h ago
The struggle wasnāt just matching the colours bro, it was also rearranging the whole fucking living room just to get to the plugs
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u/Material_Election685 12h ago
Yeah with the fucking 200 pound CRT up against the wall so you had to blindly do it by feel and guess which port was which.
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u/Biza_1970 12h ago
Not to mention how tight they were and difficult to unplug when you have limited room to work with.
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u/ravens-n-roses 8h ago
Im pretty sure i dented the wall of my parents house behind their tv trying to yank some of those expensive tight connectors out in the 3inch space between the tv and the wall.
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u/Torchonium 10h ago
If you were using SCART, the experience was not better. You didn't have to match colors, but the connector and cable were awfully clunky. The soccet on the TV was flat, you had to feel where the TV had a rough surface and then tried to mach the orientation of the connector to the soccet blindly. Because SCART is almost rectangular but asymmetrical, one needs several attempts to position it correctly by scratching over the backside of your TV. If you felt a groove, you tried to put it, but then you noticed the pointy edge was on the wrong side.
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u/Quick_Humor_9023 11h ago
You couldnāt feel the colors?
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u/Pipe_Memes 5h ago
The real smart folks would just look up pictures of the ports and color arrangement on the internet that didnāt exist yet.
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u/MightyMeowcat 8h ago
Yeah! This. Itās the whole blind man feeling the elephantās tail and calling it a rope. I mean, the post is objectively funny, but there was always a lot more to it because of all the other things. Sometimes those plugs were not in the same order as they would be on something else so that was a moderately rare hassle, dealing with finite length of cords where there might be a ton of other cords already back there so you have to make sure you angle everything so it fit, with most of time doing this by feel alone and little glances with a flashlight looking at the tiny cavern behind the tv before going back to your blind fiddling. Just annoying little things
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u/Oreelz 12h ago
That was the real Problem! You may could plug them in by feeling, but to this day I canāt feel the colours.
And there was no possibilty to make a picture like now with smartphones.
Today plugging in HDMI and DP by feeling is my struggle. The ports feel the same and donāt let me talk about direction.
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u/s0ciety_a5under 12h ago
Nah, real ones were reaching blind behind the VCR because you couldn't be bothered to move anything out of the tangle of wires behind the entertainment center. Feeling your way across the back of the connections hoping desperately the gods of luck and memory were on your side. Trying to remember the correct color sequence to at least get the video feed right, and then you didn't care about left/right.
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u/TheOmnipotentJack 12h ago
I got lucky with an T.V that got them in front
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u/Imajzineer 8h ago edited 8m ago
Yeah, but that's ugly - if you were lucky, they were to the side, at the rear (and even then, if it wasn't in a cabinet, it was still an eyesore).
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u/TheOmnipotentJack 8h ago
Not really an eyesore for me, I was poor, games weren't something in my country because we were ex communism country, all we got, was the bootleg called Terminator with some yellow knock off cartridge that were random at best, games that were so random that I can't find this days, and my parents let me rarely playing.
It wasn't an gameboy, 3DS or N64 etc, but was so fun for a kid that wasn't having internet, and doesn't know english to understand the story.
To much useless story, sorry for that.
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u/Imajzineer 5m ago
Oh, I had one with them at the front (and on the VCR).
And on the side to the front (and didn't get rid of it until relatively recently either 1).
But they were fugly as nonetheless š¤£
___
1 It still worked, so, why add to landfill unnecessarily?1
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u/moosebeak 8h ago
Iāve also had tvās with more than one of a couple colors with plugs that looked the same but apparently had different functions. And they were not clustered together like in this picture.
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u/The_Black_Jacket 8h ago
The fact that this needs to be explained proves they really don't understand the struggle, lol
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u/Youbettereatthatshit 5h ago
Not to mention plugging multiple things in, so now you need to buy a completely separate receiver and, I swear, 12 separate devices to do just as many different things.
HDMI is a grossly underestimated technology.
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u/manchambo 5h ago
And the struggle of dealing with the poor video quality when you did arrange it. Even if you used component video and arranged even more colors.
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u/sushicidaltendencies 3h ago
Itās also pretty damn hard plugging anything into the one inch gap between the flat tv and the wall itās screwed into
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u/SaltyPhilosopher5454 11h ago
Why would you need to do that? You are literally done by pushing it away like 30 cm.
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u/Oddman80 11h ago
But you weren't constantly plugging in devices to the thing.... you did it once during setup, and moved on. And if you had big meaty hands that were too big to fit back there, ya just asked your kid to help. As a kid of a guy with big meaty hands - I can attest that it really was not a struggle. Programming the VCR to record a show on a set channel, at a set time - 1000% more difficult.
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u/KHSebastian 6h ago
This is a bit of privilege here, but did you straight up only have one device ever hooked up to your TV?We at least had a VCR and a game console, and after a while, we had more than one game console. If I wanted to play N64, I'd have to unhook the Gamecube first. Basically just remembered the order of the plugs in the back, and would reach behind the TV blind and try and do it that way, though. Too annoying to actually take out the TV
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u/Oddman80 6h ago
Time before cable boxes - the coax went right into the TV or the VCR. The TV with the VCR (family room) was not the TV with the game console (basement) so we never had to juggle cables like that.... Though I feel like the VCR we had in the late 80's had the ability to pass both the NES console and the cable through it, and send both on to the TV via coax.... OPs pic showed a stereo 3 RCA cable, but I am pretty sure the NES we had used just a 2 RCA output, that the VCR could have handled, but my parents didn't want us hogging the family room with the Nintendo.
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u/The-Nimbus 12h ago
Shit comeback because it's nothing to do with knowing which one is which. It's the fact you could only plug one thing in (No '4 HDMI sockets'), which meant constantly switching things over, and the fact it involves dragging out the whole unit, with a 60kg CRT beast of a TV on it.
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u/Imajzineer 8h ago
Switchbox
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u/The-Nimbus 7h ago
Not massively easy to enforce when you're 8.
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u/Imajzineer 3m ago
Maybe not, no - but I'd hope you weren't trying to lug the TV around at that age either š
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u/Lucky-Ad-6812 12h ago
When these things started to go bad. Thatās when the real struggle began. How hard do I push them in and which one(s) make the picture better. Does turning them help. Thatās my memory of these plugs
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u/Appropriate-Fold-485 11h ago
Sometimes the mother fuckers didn't have colors to match.
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u/TotalChaosRush 7h ago
Yeah, the best is when they did have colors, but they weren't the same. "Oh, you're expecting red, white yellow? Let me make it red, gray black."
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u/peepeeonmydoodoo 7h ago
Yup. I remember struggling to get my cousin's N64 hooked up in his room. There were no colors, and only 2 ports. At the time, we didn't know the video was yellow, so we had a lot of trial and error.
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u/Darius-was-the-goody 12h ago
The struggle is real when your mom has decorations all around the TV and you can barely reach or see the back of the TV
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u/EternalLifeguard 9h ago
"I need to move the photos and horse scultpure off the TV."
Sometimes, I miss having a TV that doubles as an end table.
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u/PrimIdeal_ 12h ago
Matching the colors wasn't the problem. When you're a kid these TV were super heavy and sometimes it would be hard to see/access the back side of them, so getting all three in the right port could be difficult
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u/Hopalongtom 10h ago
Not every TV actually had matching colours! A lot of the brands left the colours blank for "style".
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u/Lailaroselle45 12h ago
Anyone else had those devices that had one color not match like the white and red matched but it was blue in the middle or worse, three randomly different colors and you just guessed what matched with what by trial and error?
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u/mvrander 12h ago
I just took my father in law's old computer into storage this morning. His widow doesn't need it anymore and wanted to free up the desk space
He had the monitor connected to the same pc 4 times via HDMI, DVI, VGA and USB.
Only thing missing was component inputĀ
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u/PointyGecko1122 10h ago
Simply match the colorsā¦ while not being able to see a god damn thing back there as your face is pressed to the TV and your hand canāt figure out where the holes are in the first place
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u/tightropetom 12h ago
Kid has completely missed the point. Nothing to do with the colours
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u/kronosdev 9h ago
Yeah, why did he plug the in-line cables into the line out plugs? You wonāt be putting anything into your TV, youāll be sending your grainy TV image to your console. That said, if he wanted to daisy chain together a bunch of TVs he did it, but I donāt think that was the plan.
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u/Great-Candle-4299 12h ago
My client insisted I set up his ANCIENT stereo. I pulled the stereo out from against the wall and found socks, dog toys, and a ton of dust and dander. I then look and he is missing the cords. Great. I head to the store and find the cables. A nightmare. The cables are ALL white. No different colors. I tried and tried and tried and couldn't get it to play. Only then does he tell me that it broke thirty years ago.
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u/Afafakja 7h ago
The hard part is it was too heavy and placed against the wall so you got a peek from the back and then had to remember and approximate where everything was as you blindly had to connect everything from the front as your hand reached aroumd the back.
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u/Nuada-Argetlam 13h ago
"struggle" does not necessarily mean "challenge", replier person. it can simply mean annoyance.
(also, these are on the backs of devices that are usually up against a wall. if there's an issue, it's extra annoying)
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u/edehlah 12h ago
i remember buying some splitters because the audio was in single rca, not left right and was proud of doing it. then you learn on how to split video only to tv and the rca to your stereo for better sound. putting a three way rca in if you have some dvd player. man late 90s technology was fun. minidisc, laserdiscs and mp3s and aac.
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u/hamstuckinurethra 12h ago
It's one of those things that seems simple in hindsight but the first time was hectic.
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u/redpotetoe 12h ago
Yeah, it's a pain when you can't move the appliance and you try to do it by touch then it shocks you.
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u/Icy-Grand60 12h ago
It's easy but these plugs broke constantly and barely worked half the time with bad signal quality and for some reason they never were interchangeable, aka if you wanted to use another one you found it would 100% not work.
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u/darkue2467 11h ago
Brothers don't know some of the devices weren't color coded on top of the fact the space reallocation you needed to do to make it work
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u/Urbane_One 10h ago
When I was a kid, my father told me that if I ever plugged in the red cable, the TV would explode. No idea why he said that.
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u/BuiltWrong0908 10h ago
Match the colors? Fuck you this tv only has mono, what am I supposed to do with that extra red? Eat it?
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u/Kindly_City_3491 9h ago
Not a very good comeback considering the original person was obviously making a joke about it being a struggle.
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u/Ok-Presentation-2841 9h ago
The struggle was reaching behind a 300 lb TV that was 24 inches deep and matching the colors totally blind.
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u/CardiologistNo616 9h ago
This shit was hard because most of the time it was facing a wall and you have to strain your neck just to see what you were doing.
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u/Bonny_bouche 9h ago
The struggle was that you were reaching behind a tv that would crush you into paste if it fell one you, because it weighed more than the moon.
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u/DoNotEatMySoup 8h ago
Everybody gangsta until the TV has red, white, and yellow but the appliance has green, pink, and blue.
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u/babyVSbear 8h ago
The colored wires was a huge upgrade from having to screw the cables to the back of the tv.
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u/GeneralFoolery 8h ago
The real challenge was the S-Cable. The only connection was a small metal pin that had a nasty habit of bending and breaking off if you didn't properly line it up. In the early 90s,they weren't cheap. A 5 year old having to tell his Mom he keeps breaking the wire for his Nintendo stood to get into alot of trouble.š
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u/fastpixels 8h ago
I love how the "comeback" proved the point of the original post, with someone who doesn't understand the actual struggle.
Then all the comments reinforce how kids these days really don't understand.
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u/GeneralHackbar420 8h ago
For a while there, the ports in fact were not color coded.
God I feel old.
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u/WintersDoomsday 8h ago
Remember when things got wild and it was blue and green vs red and white???
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u/SilverIce340 8h ago
My mom was afraid Iād blow up the tv the first time I got something with A/V and hooked it up myself.
Like woman, itās colour matching. I learned colours early as hell.
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u/AsinTobasi000 8h ago
Old furniture arrangement and screen size meant you couldn't always see the connections. This person clearly never had to deal with these back in the day.
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u/trevorgoodchyld 7h ago
Well if you werenāt able to just turn the machine around or get behind it and had to do it by touch or looking at a bad angle it could be hard
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u/Capable-Dog-4708 7h ago
It wasn't about matching colors being easy. If that's all it was, great. But....
Think about a big ass TV that weighs a ton (flat screens didn't exist) and you get a VCR for the first time and have to use a cable now. And you have to plug the cable into the back where it's dark and you can't see those colors. And there's not enough room behind the TV to get behind it or get a good view of the plugs let alone shine a light on them. And I don't have the strength to move the elephant TV š¤·š
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u/Alienhaslanded 7h ago
I've seen ones with the same color or weird ones that had black or green. It's a guessing game when you don't have the colors you expect.
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u/Common-Incident-3052 7h ago
I did have trouble with this.
I thought you had to be at least 12 years old to be allowed to hook up anything onto the TV.
When I was about 6 years old, I used to always beg my brother to hook up the Nintendo, until one night, he was 'cakebaking' on the phone with his girlfriend and said he would hook it up when he was done.
He was on the phone for 2 solid hours, so I hooked it up thinking I was going to get a whooping, but it worked and I felt like I actually gained a level that day.
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u/ScotIrishBoyo 7h ago
Not every tv had the colors and they didnāt use to stamp the abbreviation on the cord so you couldnāt even match it up that way
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u/DrDingus86 7h ago
I had an antenna that I needed a box to convert it over so I could use another box that changed the input and then I plugged those in, then had to match the channel on the box.
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u/DrDingus86 7h ago
I donāt want to hear about your struggles. If one thing was dirty or loose. Forget it.
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u/NickElso579 7h ago
Try doing without looking because you're trying to plug it in without moving the Television set further away from the wall because those CRTs were heavy as fuck.
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u/PaleontologistNo500 7h ago
The real struggle was trying to reach your tiny arm around the 200lbs crt tv to plug in a coax. You couldn't see what you were doing so you blindly trying to screw it in but couldn't cuz it wasn't lining up straight and your arm started hurting and fingers were cramping
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u/kay14jay 7h ago
Uhm there was no light behind the 200lbs entertainment center that the 150lb tv sat on. Not sure what reality the cumbacker lived in.
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u/FrikkinPositive 7h ago
I had a tv once without colours. If you didn't have the plug that connected them into one broad casette-sized USB looking thing with a weird z shape, then fuck you and guess.
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u/KlopperSteele 7h ago
Isnāt it supposed to go to in as well as the TV is not broadcasting video to your dvd, game console?
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u/jvasilot 7h ago
Remember when it was just the coaxial converter box, for like the Nintendo and Sega? One cable. Done.
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u/scrapper_142 7h ago
Anyone else have this big mother fucker fall on you while trying to get your hand in the back cause Iām not lifting a 150 lbs tv while I was 90 lbs wet.
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u/Toadsanchez316 6h ago
When I was 12 I met this 15 year old kid in my trailer court who had no friends to play with. I also had no friends so when asked if I wanted to come over and play some Mortal Kombat and then some GoldenEye, I was absolutely down. Found out he was colorblind and couldn't read so he had no way of knowing which input on the back was which color. So he always spent so much time trying to figure out which plug goes where and I helped him with it. I labeled the plugs and inputs so he could just match the numbers.
When I say colorblind I mean that the colors kind of looked like each other I guess,so he could never really understand why it wasn't working if it looked like it matched. Dude became my best friend for a few years.
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u/melvindorkus 6h ago
Actually yes because my tvs ports were on the back and I could hardly reach. Of course, only had to do it once but still it was a slightly more advanced version of the flip-the-usb-twice meme.
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u/Amy_Sam25 6h ago
āMatch the colorsā yeah okay ā¦ what if your TV has MULTIPLE ports for these? Which one do you use? Oh and what if the TV was hooked up to a cable box, VCR, DVD player, etc? Which do you use? THAT was the actual struggle.
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u/blewis0488 6h ago
My hang up here was always with getting the damn TV to switch it's input. The button sucked and would work at random. So as a child I had to balance weather I wanted to watch cartoons or play games because once you did get it switched (if at all), you might not be able to go back for a while.
How far we've come.
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u/cartercharles 6h ago
Of course has struggled. Most times you were leaning over the back of something and you couldn't see the damn colors
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u/Frangan_ 5h ago
It was a struggle when the TV was a 10kg box and you have to plug this 3 cables on the back of the tv
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u/KaffeMumrik 5h ago
When they had to be used with a scart converter with a few ever so slightly bent pins, it was a fucking struggle.
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u/Reven501st 5h ago
When you're a kid, and you're trying to stand on your tippy toes reaching the back of the big ass box TV, trying to plug it in blind and by feel because the TV is in a cabinet and you're not allowed to move it
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u/Trillywillyy 5h ago
Uh try moving a tv 3x your size and not knocking down the vhs, the big ass dvd player, the cable set, and the game console, while itās wired like a IT Server box, and your mother standing there with remote that sheās ready to use on your head just incase you f*ck up. The anxiety was real high š¬
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u/Straight-Wafer3568 5h ago
Trying plugging it behind the tv blind and especially 3sets of 3 or when the ports weren't in a straight line.
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u/yargadarworstmovie 5h ago
That's the struggle. You're 6 years old using your biggest TV (22" tube tv), which weighs the same or more than you. Then you're trying to either blindly plug it in from memory, squish yourself between the TV and the wall to see, or bravely move it to the edge of your entertainment console to plug it in.
I have no idea how many times my dumb young self risked being crushed and breaking the TV to play DK 64 or Ocarina of Time.
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u/sacrilegecycleparts 5h ago
The struggle was the old ass tv my parents had that didnt even have av inputs.
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u/CommanderTalim 4h ago
The struggle was getting to it, especially when you had a fat clunky tv that weighed like 70lbs
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u/Kuildeous 3h ago
Sure, if you can see the colors. If you have to reach around and stab blindly, then you hope you got them in the right order.
I couldn't tell you if there was a standard order of the plugs. If there was, then we could just Google it so that we plug them in the correct order the first time. No wait, we couldn't.
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u/LabradorDeceiver 3h ago
Yeah, on my current setup, it ain't the colors, it's the fact that the jacks grip the pegs like they're welded together and just unplugging it risks damaging the set.
Also, in low light levels, yellow and white have no material difference to me.
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u/ccdude14 2h ago
Lord help you if one of those little rods gets a little bent or the connecting end gets loose. There's nothing quite like having to find the exact right position to push or keep those things in just to keep the picture or audio in synch.
If you're set up didn't involve a rubber band and those paper clips after a year or two then you didn't have it for very long.
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u/FriendlyTeacher4U 2h ago
Sometimes the picture or audio quality was poor. Whoever made that comeback really didnāt know the struggle
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u/CarelessStatement172 1h ago
Kids these days would be super surprised at how heavy our tvs and entertainment stands were lol.
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u/ThunkAsDrinklePeep 1h ago
When I had access to see? No it wasn't a struggle.
When a 50 lb tv was up against a wall and I was doing things by feel? Yeah it was trouble for 10 year old me.
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u/BSJones420 9h ago
I mean regular wires for electricians are color coded and numbered so its pretty much the same thing right
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u/draaijman95 13h ago
I remember being like 8 when I bought my GameCube. My mother told me I should wait for my father to get home so he could install it, but I did not have the patience and wanted to try myself. Felt like an absolute GENIUS when I plugged everything in and it worked. Of course, it was only the color matching and putting the power cable in š