Add a little high techness for my Zenith Porthole ...

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by VintagePC

Problem is that it's completely useless to those of us visiting via regular PC.

I just looked at the restoration pictures of the Fleetwood console. I did not realize Fleetwood was mainly a Canadian manufacturer of TVs and radios, nor did I realize that FM radio did not become popular in Canada until some years after this set was made. Here in the US, the early (1960s-'70s) FM stations (those few which were on the air at the time, most of which were in major cities) played little more than what was then known as "elevator music". Most FM stations in the Cleveland area played elevator music until the early 1990s, although one station made the switch to live DJs some twenty years earlier when it was sold from NBC to a local media group.

By 1991 there was only one "easy listening" (a. k. a. elevator music) station left in this area; six months or so later, that station (WREO-FM in Ashtabula, Ohio, 50 miles east of Cleveland on Lake Erie) had switched to live soft rock, later to become a moderately hard-rock outlet. This marked the end of easy listening on FM in Cleveland and environs.

When did FM radio begin in Canada, and what type of music was played on the stations at the time? Did Canadian FM begin with easy listening as US stations did? I live near Lake Erie and often hear FM stations from Windsor and other parts of southwestern Ontario, just using the built-in antennas on my radios. Used to get TV reception from Windsor, Ontario (CKLW-TV channel 9, now CBET) and CFPL-TV channel 10 in London, Ontario before I got cable. The cable system here, which has changed hands several times since my area got cable in 1982, did pick up CFPL briefly, but the channel was dropped from the system's lineup after about a year or so.


BTW, in reference to the "QR" code mentioned above, I think it would be an excellent idea if some software maker came up with software for PCs, with a dedicated scanner of course, that would read these codes. Why should people with so-called "smartphones" be the only ones able to read those things?