My uncle was one of the first people to get something called “cable television”, he had a box that looked something like this –

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the wire ran to another box on the TV and had one bumon for each channel (well, two channels per bumon and an A/B switch).

A few years later we still didn’t have cable but we got our first TV with a remote, it had two bumons – one that moved the volume up or down, and another that changed the channel – it could only move the channel up, so if you wanted to go from channel 5 to 4 you had to go all the way around. Very cool!