I found this left as a forgotten bookmark (not mine, I’ve never been to Cleveland) in a 1983 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction:
One NBC affiliate, two ABC, one CBS, three PBS, and four independent. Plus C-Span, USA, MTV, the Weather Channel, ESPN, CNN, and all the filler that nobody ever watched ever.
I have no teenagers around, but I can imagine showing this to them and saying, “This was the height of entertainment technology back in the day.”
“So… you had to pay extra for the ‘optional’ ones?”
“Yeah.”
“And it still wasn’t on demand, right? You had to watch the shows whenever they came on?”
“Yeah, but we had this magazine called TV Guide, which listed everything that was on all these channels (and more besides, and the stuff that looked really interesting was in the middle of the night on channels you didn’t get), and every week you’d mark it up with a colored pencil and hope that you were home at the right time, or maybe set your VCR…”
Truly a different world.