Oh man, that just gave me one HELL of a nostalgia hit.
I just found one of those old switch boxes a few days ago. The boxes where the antenna and the Atari plugged in, and then you switched it to whichever input you wanted.
I heard this picture.
That’s how I watched HBO on a 15" black and white TV late night (should be sleeping) back in the '80s. Real Sex was an eye opener for a pre-teen…
I used to do home integration and security and I found one of these installed at a client’s house by the last installer…you’ll never guess how they were using it.
The prongs were soldered to a transformer and the other end was on a coax that went outside…but to where?
Turns out it was the old cable run from Comcast that they repurposed…to power the path lights in the backyard.
I still have it in my toner kit bag. They’re great for tracing coax!
Oh no, it was 100% stupid and not to code. The client didn’t pay for jank - we’re talking about a $5m home! It was shorted and we thought the switch had just died before realizing.
The other end didn’t have any adapter, it was just stripped back and twisted onto the light wire…smashed between the grass and stone path. No solder. The second “wire” in a coax is the braided sheath so you can imagine the quality of that “splice”
Ha. Yeah, OK that’s stupid. I do work in the same kind of homes and have seen some janky shit too. Extension cord wire to run “just one more outlet”, J boxes filled with drywall mud and newspaper to “make it a safe” junction. We moved a fridge once and found they’d used a lamp cord as an extension cord. And don’t get me started on hvac guys and plumbers butchering joists.
