JP1 Remotes

[Mark Pierson]

There was a blurb on the radio this afternoon that mentioned today as being the 40th anniversary of the TV remote!

The first remote I ever saw was around 1982 or so on a VCR lent to me by a friend. It was connected via a cable to the unit, and I remember thinking the concept was cool. I also received a Zenith color TV that year that had an IR remote that was about the size of a brick! Every command was carried out with a distinctive "thunking" sound, since several internal relays were used in the process.
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Mark

[Nils_Ekberg]

Mark

When I UPGRADED to those models you rememeber I was really impressed

Actually, I do remembered the wired remote and the ones with switches in them
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Nils
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[johnsfine]

I forget what year my parents got a TV with a wired remote with which channel up/down buttons signaled to a motor which moved the knob that tuned the TV.

Years later (December 1975) I graduated college (at age 19), got my first full time job and my first TV. It had a wireless (utrasonic) remote (not much bigger than a URC-7800) with digits, etc like a modern remote. The literature where I bought it claimed it was the only TV with solid state digital tuning (the few other TV that selected channels with digit keys still had motors moving mechanical tuner parts).

[mr_d_p_gumby]

The first remote I owned was for a Zenith TV. It was a mechanical ultrasonic remote. When you pressed the buttons, the remote went "thunk", and then the TV went "thunk" or "whiir-whir". Of course, sometimes when the phone rang, the TV went "thunk" also.

Around 1980 I got an RCA VCR with a wired remote. It was very quiet, but you had to get good at repairing the connections on the plug because people kept tripping over the wire.

The next remote I had was an ultrasonic X10 remote. I have two of them now, and they still work. They served me well until One-For-All made the URC-3000 IR X10 Command Center (now known as the X10 IR-543) available.

After that came a rapid accumulation of remotes for all kinds of things. I think the first IR remote was for an Aiwa cassette deck (1979-vintage; you should see the protocol that one needs!). My first universal remote was a GE RRC600 Control Central universal learning remote (nice hard buttons), followed by a JVC RM-S1 (until my wife's fingernails wore through the touch screen). I even tried a CORE with a PC interface for a while, but eventually I had to get a Pronto. Of course, they are all now obsoleted by a nice 15-1994!
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Mike England

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[classicsat]

the Zenith remote was purely mechanical (and probably the genesis for every remote on TV and movies emitting an audible "click" when used.)
Each button had a hammer and a specificlly tuned tone bar. Pressing the button compressed the happer to a spring, then releasd the hammer to "ring" the note of the tone bar. The receiver had a high frequency microphone, which was amplified connected to a few bandpass filters (each tuned to the frequency of one of the tone bars in the hand unit), which drove a relay. (which turned the tuner motor(s), or a stepper coil, for the volume and power.

In the early days of wired remotes:
I had a cable box that had a wired control. It had something like one row of 16 buttond, and an A/B switch, selecting CHs 2-15, and 16-31 (or something like that) . I modified that convertor by adding a switch (and relay in the set top portion), to turn the TV on an off from the wired remote. Some early IR remotes worked in a similar fasion, except electronics creating the tone which was transmitted by an IR LED. No doubt there were ultrasonic remotes that used an electronic circuit to crate the tone, with near identical electronics to the tone bar-hammer system. And later, there were coded ultrasonic remotes which sent data not unlike modern IR remotes.

In the very early days of video rentals, some VCRs we rented had wired remotes that connected with a mini din, others had just a 1/8 mono plug. The latter works by each button impressing a different resistance across the line.

[jon_armstrong]

[classicsat]

No.The way the receiver side worked was it had a chip that detected the resistance, and lowered line which connected tot he line for each button on the remote.

One thing I did do is take an IR remote system controller from a Sony component stereo, and convert the cassette controls to emulate reistances of the wired control, making a wirless control.