[WarOnPrivacy]

    Growing up in the 90s, television was a different experience.
    You turned on the TV, and whatever was playing at that moment
    would become your entertainment.

    Strangely enough, I miss that feeling of having something
    selected for me, something I cannot influence.

I grew up a few decades before and I lack the author's nostalgia. I think some of that is because my exposure to OTA TV was much longer. Some was because I missed TV's first Golden Age and TV trended toward awful afterward - with some exceptions (Taxi & 1980s NBC Thru night are 2). I never had cable so I can't factor that in.

Between having control over what I watch and some of the absolutely stellar content that's come out in the last generation, I've no nostalgia for OTA TV of yore. I really like what I have.

[smelendez]

Also, people knew what was on TV before they turned it on.

People bought TV Guide magazine, which was pages and pages of listings, or looked at the TV page in the newspaper.

You also generally had the airtimes for your favorite shows memorized (I bet a lot of people who were alive in the '90s could still tell you when, e.g., Seinfeld, ER, The Simpsons, and The X-Files were on and on what channel number).

[mingus88]

Yeah, I grew up on a rural OTA antenna with one clear channel and two dodgy ones.

The live experience was better for zoning out. That’s about it. You had no choice.

Today I can spend 20 minutes just browsing and never settle on anything. I’m never able to just zone out.

[gerdesj]

Well, I was born in black and white. As a lad in the UK in the '70s, we had three channels on the goggle box - BBC1 and 2 and ITV, which was regional. If you lived in the right place you could get two ITV regions equally badly. You tuned the TV with a rotary knob.

Viewing figures for some programmes were staggering due to the obvious reason - little choice. For example I seem to recall that some episodes of say Neighbours (Australian soap), had more viewers in the UK than the entire population of Australia! The marriage of Charlene (Kylie M) and that blonde bloke (Jason D) was one.

[hapticmonkey]

These sorts of things are fun projects, and I appreciate the effort that goes into them. But running my own media server with 4K mkv files I can browse and play on an OLED TV is light years ahead of what I had in the 90s, and I love it.

[ghaff]

Certainly as an adult I was never really a channel surfer I had a lot of programs I wanted to watch and if I cared enough I would set the VCR once those were available.