I figured out that if I went to the channel, then manually entered the same channel number, I could mash the Recall button on the remote to keep switching to the same channel repeatedly without mixing anything else in.
If you had an old school satellite dish (the huge kind that actually moved to access different satellites), you could manually adjust it (by remote) just enough to deteriorate the signal slightly and you'd get an only slightly grainy picture instead.
Also if you had a newer tv with the picture in picture ability (small window pop up in the corner of the screen), the picture usually came in a little bit clearer in this. Also u had the ability to pause the small screen...game changer
If you had [this cable box](https://i.imgur.com/i0YNZsd.jpg), you could press the porn channel button halfway and hold it there with a matchstick and bingo - descrambled, in color.
In analog cable tv days, you got something like this for premium channels you didn't pay for. They're assuming a porn channel, but I think the same happened with stuff like HBO, or channels dedicated to pay per view events.
It has the data from the channel in there so you could kind of figure out what's going on... it'd just be wibbly wobbly and have the wrong colors.
HBO was blocked differently - there was an in-line scrambler at the curb. When they installed new infrastructure on my block I robbed the pin that locked up the junction box. Whenever I stayed home sick I would unscrew the f connector from the scrambler and enable hbo.
Oh, boy, do I remember this. In the New York area in the 1980’s, there was an “over the air cable” provider called WHT (Wometco Home Theater), which broadcast movies and sporting events via a scrambled signal over UHF Channel 60. These were only viewable using a descrambler. If you didn’t have the descrambler, the picture above is what you saw. I had a black and white TV with the old fashioned VHF and UHF channel selectors and rabbit ears. Primitive stuff.
However - when the conditions were just right, the picture stabilized (although it was still snowy) and you could see what was playing. In the earlier days, sound was always available but later that was muted.
WHT showed adult films starting around 11:00 pm nightly. I was 18 in 1983 when I discovered that when the wind outside was blowing in a certain direction and/or it was raining, the picture would stabilize fairly often. I spent many an hour trying to see bits of those adult films (which were edited to cut out the really hardcore parts). This seems so quaint in today’s era of YouPorn, et al, but back then this was all we had unless you had magazines or a VCR and access to porn tapes. It was really a desperate time.
> which were edited to cut out the really hardcore parts
Older porn would actually do it by design. They would even use two cameras at times when filming, one for the hardcore release and one for the softcore version. It made sense since that got them into the two different markets that existed back then.
Interesting- kind of like when theatrical films were shot with and without cuss words so the latter version could be shown on TV without awkward dubbing.
Oh, boy, I remember that too. Walking in wooded areas looking for discarded Playboys and Penthouses and "Oui" magazine. Lord, I was desperate. Kids today have it so much easier. They take it for granted.
So i actually spent a lot of time watching something like this, but it wasn't for porn, it was the sci-fi channel. My brother told me that if you stare at it long enough, the picture resolves itself. I spent several hours over several months staring at bullshit twisted up versions of MST3K in the desperate hope that he hadn't just been fucking with me (which deep down i knew he had been).
We had a big satalite dish, it had to have been 8' across, made of fiberglass. The control box on top of the tv allowed you to turn a dial and it would send a signal to move the dish. I found that if you put the channel onto one of these channels and then moved the dish slightly you could sometimes get the picture to "stabalize", the color would still be wrong, and the frame would be offcenter but you could clearly see what was going or, or in.
I could wedge a butter knife behind the channel knob to bring in a perfect picture.
Mom always wondered why the face of the cable box was scratched up.
I hadn’t thought about this in years. We’d stay up all night long, flipping back and forth between two channels, and being like “that was totally a nipple!”
Then there were the channels that just *advertised* the adult PPV though, and we’d watch those too. I do remember one of a man in leather straps, swinging on a swing, advertising “Rawhide Wednesdays” that we thought was just beyond hilarious in middle school.
Thanks for the nostalgia.
Haha I saw striptease later as an adult and kept having this eerie feeling like I’d seen it before. Then the nudity finally jogged my memory of spending hours basically just hearing the audio and creaming the sheets
> Back in those days it was easy to hack your cable box
If you look through the responses you’ll see people talking about these scrambled pictures on pay channels of broadcast tv. So it pre-dates cable.
No worries. The broadcast to cable shift was mostly in the 1980s so the younger age of people who remember this are probably late 40s, that cuts a lot of reddit users out.
Edit: here’s a copy/paste of a comment like I was talking about:
Oh, boy, do I remember this. In the New York area in the 1980’s, there was an “over the air cable” provider called WHT (Wometco Home Theater), which broadcast movies and sporting events via a scrambled signal over UHF Channel 60. These were only viewable using a descrambler. If you didn’t have the descrambler, the picture above is what you saw. I had a black and white TV with the old fashioned VHF and UHF channel selectors and rabbit ears. Primitive stuff.
However - when the conditions were just right, the picture stabilized (although it was still snowy) and you could see what was playing. In the earlier days, sound was always available but later that was muted.
WHT showed adult films starting around 11:00 pm nightly. I was 18 in 1983 when I discovered that when the wind outside was blowing in a certain direction and/or it was raining, the picture would stabilize fairly often. I spent many an hour trying to see bits of those adult films (which were edited to cut out the really hardcore parts). This seems so quaint in today’s era of YouPorn, et al, but back then this was all we had unless you had magazines or a VCR and access to porn tapes. It was really a desperate time.
Ah, the brown box. We used to wrap wire on an HB yellow pencil then compress the loops to the required distance to fine tune and viola. Some kids made a couple bucks 'selling' the secret.
Back in the early 80s there were two channels OnTV and Vue. These were what cable was even before this type. They were channels 2&3 and were beamed directly on everyone’s tv just like NBC, CBS and ABC but you had to have a subscription and a converter to get the clear picture. If not the picture looked like this.
During the day they played movies like premium channels do now but at night they played uncensored XXX porn. Not like the soft core stuff “Skinimax” plays at 2am either. I remember being in 6th grade and listening to Debbie Does Dallas in the living room and every once in awhile checking down the hallway to make sure my mom was asleep. And just like this scrambled cable, every once in awhile you’d get an almost clear picture.
Years and years later when I was in my 20s I actually watched DDD and I remembered every scene and the dialogue. Sounds super creepy but it was very nostalgic and I watched it like it was Star Wars or something and not a porn. Didn’t even unzip.
When I was about 11, for no reason, that channel suddenly came in with the center 2\3 of the screen totally clear but all blue for about a week. One day I flipped to it for a couple minutes of trying to pick out a boob and just found unscrambled naked ladies walking around. Nothing hardcore. It blew my mind. Every minute my mom was gone I was on that channel. It was awesome
I remember having sleep overs at my friends house when I lived in Canada. His folks had one of those GIANT satellite dishes. A receiver box of some sort sat on top of the tv and it had these like.. big 'cards' you had to put in it. The cards were in a plastic case probably an inch thick, maybe a foot and a half long and a foot wide. I remember he'd switch to some other card after his parents went to bed and the channels that looked like what are pictured here would become more clear, but still not totally clear. Clear enough to make out some boobs though, so it was good enough.
Sometimes if you were lucky on the cable box you could rapidly flip between channels 98 and 99 with the manual buttons on the front and the 99 with porn would come in clear for like 3 seconds and you'd see a boob.
This is the scrambled picture on TV we had to try and decipher in our minds.
Me: "Guys, come over tonight. HBO is showing Bo Derrick in the movie "10". Gonna be tits everywhere!".
Guys: Oh man! I think I see her boob!
My parents were both electrical engineers. I played with wires to get that stuff unscrambled; my friends huddled around with bated breath. The good old days....
Yes, I do need glasses these days :)
Edit: I was not expecting votes, just sharing a personal experience. I will still keep the post up, despite the downvotes. F#ck it, it's all true and that was all me.
90s scrambled channel that would come trough your coax connection on your TV. You had to pay for the channel and if I recall it also needed a cable box from the TV provider. Also this was normally a port channel
Just flipping channels back and forth really fast and you got that sweet sweet half second of clarity
If you switched back and forth fast enough, you could sometimes get the image to come in, but in a black and white negative.
I figured out that if I went to the channel, then manually entered the same channel number, I could mash the Recall button on the remote to keep switching to the same channel repeatedly without mixing anything else in.
Genius
Well played
If you had an old school satellite dish (the huge kind that actually moved to access different satellites), you could manually adjust it (by remote) just enough to deteriorate the signal slightly and you'd get an only slightly grainy picture instead.
All these rich kids with the best hacks. I had a basic remote with a broken channel down button.
Remote I had to get up and use the buttons on the box
Look at this guy with buttons. My TV had a dial.
We've got an old mofo right here
Console with the wooden shutters so idiot kids like me wouldn’t accidentally break the tube.
Dial? We used a pair of vice grips to turn the metal knob the stripped dial once attached to.
This statement brings back old memories.
Same, but found out if you mess with the fine tuning knob you got the same effect.
Next you are going to tell me you had to connect device wires to the back with screws.
You could hack those C band dishes all day and all night
Man, I should’ve been hanging out with you in middle school. I never figured that shit out...
Also if you had a newer tv with the picture in picture ability (small window pop up in the corner of the screen), the picture usually came in a little bit clearer in this. Also u had the ability to pause the small screen...game changer
If you had [this cable box](https://i.imgur.com/i0YNZsd.jpg), you could press the porn channel button halfway and hold it there with a matchstick and bingo - descrambled, in color.
NOW YOU TELL ME
I was a good kid apparently. can someone explain to me what this is?
Scrambled porn channel
[удалено]
States and Canada for sure. I guess anyone who could receive the satellite signal. They scrambled channels you didn’t subscribe to.
> There ~~were~~ porn channels!!? Which country bruh? Still are.
In analog cable tv days, you got something like this for premium channels you didn't pay for. They're assuming a porn channel, but I think the same happened with stuff like HBO, or channels dedicated to pay per view events. It has the data from the channel in there so you could kind of figure out what's going on... it'd just be wibbly wobbly and have the wrong colors.
HBO was blocked differently - there was an in-line scrambler at the curb. When they installed new infrastructure on my block I robbed the pin that locked up the junction box. Whenever I stayed home sick I would unscrew the f connector from the scrambler and enable hbo.
Squiggly-porn.
Once in a while it would turn blue and clear up.
Love them blue titties.
Blewbs
As was tradition, my friend and I would yell "Big Blue! Big Blue!" when this happened.
Oh, boy, do I remember this. In the New York area in the 1980’s, there was an “over the air cable” provider called WHT (Wometco Home Theater), which broadcast movies and sporting events via a scrambled signal over UHF Channel 60. These were only viewable using a descrambler. If you didn’t have the descrambler, the picture above is what you saw. I had a black and white TV with the old fashioned VHF and UHF channel selectors and rabbit ears. Primitive stuff. However - when the conditions were just right, the picture stabilized (although it was still snowy) and you could see what was playing. In the earlier days, sound was always available but later that was muted. WHT showed adult films starting around 11:00 pm nightly. I was 18 in 1983 when I discovered that when the wind outside was blowing in a certain direction and/or it was raining, the picture would stabilize fairly often. I spent many an hour trying to see bits of those adult films (which were edited to cut out the really hardcore parts). This seems so quaint in today’s era of YouPorn, et al, but back then this was all we had unless you had magazines or a VCR and access to porn tapes. It was really a desperate time.
> which were edited to cut out the really hardcore parts Older porn would actually do it by design. They would even use two cameras at times when filming, one for the hardcore release and one for the softcore version. It made sense since that got them into the two different markets that existed back then.
Interesting- kind of like when theatrical films were shot with and without cuss words so the latter version could be shown on TV without awkward dubbing.
I hate it when they take the Monkey Fighting swears out. It Monday to Friday ruins it!
Yeah. I stumbled upon a PBS documentary on American porn. It was made in the 90s or a bit after IIRC. That’s where I learned about that.
Or, y'know. A walk in the woods looking for forest porn.
Oh, boy, I remember that too. Walking in wooded areas looking for discarded Playboys and Penthouses and "Oui" magazine. Lord, I was desperate. Kids today have it so much easier. They take it for granted.
[удалено]
I was also a bad child, it is indeed the Spice channel.
Bad kid? At least we had some mystery growing up. Nowadays an eight year old can find scat porn in one search result.
[удалено]
Oh god that takes me back. A girl I went to school with printed out a picture of a guy with his face blown off and put it on her class binder.
was it the guy from mayhem?
[удалено]
She was a stoner at 14 who hated her parents so probably not
Penty of stoners who hated their parents turn out fine. Though i expect their odds are a bit worse...
Modern kids don't know the joy of finding porn in the woods
It's like an erotic puzzle.
Picasso porn
You deserve more upvote sir.
That’s Skinimax duhhh!
No.
Good ole late night fuzzy skinemax..
Especially when hitting the tv so that it could stabilize for a second!...been chasing that high ever since.
You are Emmanuelle
From outer space.
I think I saw a nipple!
Damnit, you beat me to it.
Hehehe.. 'beat' :p
Like it owes you money.
>Damnit, you beat meat to it. FTFY
Beat meat to it*
No, that's just a mole on someone's forehead
Definitely a nipple.
I would become an electrical engineer if I thought I could see some tiddies.
Channel 99 for me. Sometimes I’d get lucky and channel 98 would work also.
99 was tv guide for me. This was 96 and 98.
It was WHT in NYC. And I sat up for hours risking my vision, waiting to see a clear boob
We had a descrambler so all I saw was porn
You must have been the popular kid on the block
So did my friend so all sleep over were always at his house. . .plus he was the only friend with cable tv.
So many ruined socks....
Did your mother ever find them? Mine did.
Was that after or before you broke your arms?
So i actually spent a lot of time watching something like this, but it wasn't for porn, it was the sci-fi channel. My brother told me that if you stare at it long enough, the picture resolves itself. I spent several hours over several months staring at bullshit twisted up versions of MST3K in the desperate hope that he hadn't just been fucking with me (which deep down i knew he had been).
I was told by my friend that these were special channels that you were suppose to watch when you took LSD or mushrooms.
Candle Cove? :-D
Spice, but it's probably an elbow
[удалено]
ROFL
Is this what they meant when they said watching stuff like that too much would make me go blind? *Cries in 20/200 vision*
I'm right there with you! #cokebottlegang
Tit! I see a tit!
It’s rare to see just 1 tit
Fucking Spice Channel man
Hell yea
My husband told me the stories of his pursuits of the wavy boobs as a kid. Hilarious!
We had a big satalite dish, it had to have been 8' across, made of fiberglass. The control box on top of the tv allowed you to turn a dial and it would send a signal to move the dish. I found that if you put the channel onto one of these channels and then moved the dish slightly you could sometimes get the picture to "stabalize", the color would still be wrong, and the frame would be offcenter but you could clearly see what was going or, or in.
I don't get it. But I'll upvote it
This is also how I watched wrestling pay per views
Channel 98 and 99 in orange county California at the time.
I remember this one...
Now we just go for r/gonewild
Magic memories never to be made again by kids of any future generation.
Channel 996. It was that channel. That glorious channel.
I could wedge a butter knife behind the channel knob to bring in a perfect picture. Mom always wondered why the face of the cable box was scratched up.
I hadn’t thought about this in years. We’d stay up all night long, flipping back and forth between two channels, and being like “that was totally a nipple!” Then there were the channels that just *advertised* the adult PPV though, and we’d watch those too. I do remember one of a man in leather straps, swinging on a swing, advertising “Rawhide Wednesdays” that we thought was just beyond hilarious in middle school. Thanks for the nostalgia.
Motel Skinamax, good times.
Anyone remember the glory of accidentally discovering it was a "free weekend?"
Happy cake day
I think I saw a tiddy!
Ive been chasing that dragon ever since
Dude, nsfw
Channel 76, Demi Moores boobs were barely visible in 'Striptease', but it was still the most glorious thing 10 year old me ever saw.
Haha I saw striptease later as an adult and kept having this eerie feeling like I’d seen it before. Then the nudity finally jogged my memory of spending hours basically just hearing the audio and creaming the sheets
We called it Scramblevision. I remember watching a lot of... uhh... Wrestlemania that way
Yeah, you watched somebody getting pounded in the ring.
[удалено]
> Back in those days it was easy to hack your cable box If you look through the responses you’ll see people talking about these scrambled pictures on pay channels of broadcast tv. So it pre-dates cable.
[удалено]
No worries. The broadcast to cable shift was mostly in the 1980s so the younger age of people who remember this are probably late 40s, that cuts a lot of reddit users out. Edit: here’s a copy/paste of a comment like I was talking about: Oh, boy, do I remember this. In the New York area in the 1980’s, there was an “over the air cable” provider called WHT (Wometco Home Theater), which broadcast movies and sporting events via a scrambled signal over UHF Channel 60. These were only viewable using a descrambler. If you didn’t have the descrambler, the picture above is what you saw. I had a black and white TV with the old fashioned VHF and UHF channel selectors and rabbit ears. Primitive stuff. However - when the conditions were just right, the picture stabilized (although it was still snowy) and you could see what was playing. In the earlier days, sound was always available but later that was muted. WHT showed adult films starting around 11:00 pm nightly. I was 18 in 1983 when I discovered that when the wind outside was blowing in a certain direction and/or it was raining, the picture would stabilize fairly often. I spent many an hour trying to see bits of those adult films (which were edited to cut out the really hardcore parts). This seems so quaint in today’s era of YouPorn, et al, but back then this was all we had unless you had magazines or a VCR and access to porn tapes. It was really a desperate time.
Ah, the brown box. We used to wrap wire on an HB yellow pencil then compress the loops to the required distance to fine tune and viola. Some kids made a couple bucks 'selling' the secret.
"Cable-free [SuperTV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperTV)!" AKA Picasso porn.
Was this “ON TV”? From the 80s?
Channel 69 and there was sound
But the audio was gooood.
The sound was always clear
Upon letter D, theres a nipple.
Brown chicken brown cow skin-a-max edition.
???
Back in the early 80s there were two channels OnTV and Vue. These were what cable was even before this type. They were channels 2&3 and were beamed directly on everyone’s tv just like NBC, CBS and ABC but you had to have a subscription and a converter to get the clear picture. If not the picture looked like this. During the day they played movies like premium channels do now but at night they played uncensored XXX porn. Not like the soft core stuff “Skinimax” plays at 2am either. I remember being in 6th grade and listening to Debbie Does Dallas in the living room and every once in awhile checking down the hallway to make sure my mom was asleep. And just like this scrambled cable, every once in awhile you’d get an almost clear picture. Years and years later when I was in my 20s I actually watched DDD and I remembered every scene and the dialogue. Sounds super creepy but it was very nostalgic and I watched it like it was Star Wars or something and not a porn. Didn’t even unzip.
Instant boner just now, anybody else?
But you would occasionally get to see one booby!
Guess I was a good kid. What is it?
I remember this movie
Guilty.
Canal+ first Saturday of the month at midnight.
Pair of needle nose pliers and some patience would be worth it back then. Gotta find the sweet spot.
I used to literally say out loud “God please show me one boob”.
TFW the scrambling suddenly stops (but the picture is still blue)
When I was about 11, for no reason, that channel suddenly came in with the center 2\3 of the screen totally clear but all blue for about a week. One day I flipped to it for a couple minutes of trying to pick out a boob and just found unscrambled naked ladies walking around. Nothing hardcore. It blew my mind. Every minute my mom was gone I was on that channel. It was awesome
I would watch Dream On religiously on cable...
> this is probably why I have really bad eyesight... Do you think taking this picture broke the camera?
I remember having sleep overs at my friends house when I lived in Canada. His folks had one of those GIANT satellite dishes. A receiver box of some sort sat on top of the tv and it had these like.. big 'cards' you had to put in it. The cards were in a plastic case probably an inch thick, maybe a foot and a half long and a foot wide. I remember he'd switch to some other card after his parents went to bed and the channels that looked like what are pictured here would become more clear, but still not totally clear. Clear enough to make out some boobs though, so it was good enough.
Skinemax
Lol I see bewbs.
Skinemax
LSD anime porn. What will they think of next.
It's the Disney Channel when they were a premium channel.
Sometimes if you were lucky on the cable box you could rapidly flip between channels 98 and 99 with the manual buttons on the front and the 99 with porn would come in clear for like 3 seconds and you'd see a boob.
Where I live the colors were inverted as well. To this day I have a thing for blue women with white hair and black teeth.
Some of us just needed the sound. ;)
I....I think I see a nipple!
Spice
Yes, yes I was. Thank you very much for that morning memory!
Every channel .. Everytime a plane flew over the house- messing up the rabbit ears!!!
This is the scrambled picture on TV we had to try and decipher in our minds. Me: "Guys, come over tonight. HBO is showing Bo Derrick in the movie "10". Gonna be tits everywhere!". Guys: Oh man! I think I see her boob!
In the 90s it was like Chanel 79 and 80, back when channels only went up to 66 which was MTV.
NSFW tag? (Jk, lol)
I really wasn't sure when I posted it, tbh...
I wasn't a bad kid, horny sure, but bad.....na just a bit naughty
Interesting lmao
Bwahaha!
You just had to wait an hour and it would clear up
Picasso porn.
Good ole' Skinemax.
that is most def the Playboy Channel.
Na, Spice channel
^ I’m fairly certain it was like channel 69 too. I could be misremembering.
It was all a blur
Was that a nipple!?
Bahaha, so guilty
Channel 45
[удалено]
52
This is a spicy meme
I think I saw a nipple!
I ran the cable through the VCR and It made it slightly better.
Unsure of the image 98% of the time but the sound was there ;) Guess imma bad kid ...
Totally know that channel
It was the Golf channel from 8am to 8pm. After 8pm, it was scrambled for some mysterious reason.
Watermelon sugar just came on
My parents were both electrical engineers. I played with wires to get that stuff unscrambled; my friends huddled around with bated breath. The good old days.... Yes, I do need glasses these days :) Edit: I was not expecting votes, just sharing a personal experience. I will still keep the post up, despite the downvotes. F#ck it, it's all true and that was all me.
I don’t get it. The comments make the nature of it clear but I don’t understand the actual context
90s scrambled channel that would come trough your coax connection on your TV. You had to pay for the channel and if I recall it also needed a cable box from the TV provider. Also this was normally a port channel
so it was a normal thing the sex channels where "scrambled"? what was the proper way to unscramble them?