Lonnehart
Okay… I'm starting to wonder how old you really are, Cartoon Professor. Or maybe television simply arrived later in your area.

A lot of people didn't bother with TVs just because they didn't like them Lonne. Plus TVs were always fairly expensive in Australia.

Lonnehart
And your cell phones can reach far into the desert???

Not generally. Cartoon-professor wasn't talking about the desert I think, probably the forrested bush. Phone towers on the big hills mean the signals have a wide coverage.

In the true desert in Australia you're limited to long range CDMA phones if you're not tooo far from a population centre, or true satellite phones if you are. -That's what the mining companies and surveyors rely on.

Satellite phones are bulky… funnily enough that's for sort of the same reason as why older phones were so large: it wasn't because they were crude and simple or that they couldn't miniaturise the tech necessarily… The biggest reasons for the size was that there just weren't the phone towers about to give a good signal so they had to be more robust and powerful to get good reception and transmit.
That required a LOT more power so their batteries had to be a lot bigger. Most of the weight was the battery, that sometimes had to be carried separately.
-Batteries also couldn't store as much charge for as long and components drew a little more power generally.

I see. Way back when a B/W TV was pretty expensive. At least by 1970s standards. Color TVs even more so. I remember that the first TV I got to watch was color, somewhere around 1974-5. My father and grandfather worked really hard to save up money for one. And I guess TV wasn't for everyone back then. There were better forms of entertainment besides sitting in front of a tri-electron gun blasting chemicals coating coated glass to make them glow…

heh… I need to remember that when people are talking about “the bush” the term has different meanings. I was thinking about Africa, when they use the term to refer to the savannah or sparsely vegetation covered desert. -_-

My family used to have a working TV in every room from ‘97 until about 2006. My computer monitor is an HDTV and I play video games on it with the Xbox but to watch TV in my house you either have to the big TV downstairs with the HD Sky or my mum and dad’s room for standard freeview. And even though they have that TV we all end up going downstairs anyway to argue over things we want to watch.

We had an answering machine/fax machine once (Requiring an audio tape to record the message to leave to people trying to call you.) and ended up having to give it back.

My family was close to dirt poor in the early 90s. (Close to is because my mum would never live in a dirty house. Lol.)
My parents almost gave away our dog at one point. And the only reason we actually GOT a mobile phone and the answering maschine was because of one of my dad's jobs that required them. We even had a laptop at one point but were also required to give that back.