Growing up, cable didn't come in around my very rural area of Maine. We had one of those gigantic satellite dishes in our back yard. You could hear it move when it was changed to certain channels. This was how I was able to watch Fraggle Rock on HBO and the Disney channel and Nickelodeon. As well as obscure channels that showed Canadian shows like The Raccoons and Seabert.  They still don't offer cable in my parent's neck of the woods but these days they've had a much smaller roof top Direct Tv  satellite for years now. The only shows that I wasn't able to watch back then we're on Fox, like The Simpsons, because for many years the Satellite didn't pick up Fox. 

i just had basic cable with around 40+ channels, the only two channels i still remember by number were cartoon network, which was channel 17, and nickelodeon, channel 29.

I had basic cable for a big part of my life, but my family upgraded to digital cable at around 2002. My biggest memory with digital cable is watching G4 around 2002 back when the network was focused primarily around video games.

Growing up we definitely had cable, but at some point my parents must have stopped paying for it because I distinctly remember a period of relying on PBS and WB ('member the WB?) for my tv entertainment.

Oh yes. We absolutely had the giant dish in the yard. In fact, it’s still there... complete with a golf ball sized hole in the mesh that got there from, you guessed it, a golf ball.

I watched all the good channels in their infancy thanks to that dish. And then much later, when the channels started charging for access, I discovered the wonderful world of live feeds and little known shopping channels. I got to watch my favorite basketball team play home games whenever I came home from college on the weekends (Golden State, long before they were dominant).

I really didn't know what we had when I was little, but I remember watching either CMT or TNN so I guess we did have basic cable at some point.  Mostly we watched local channels I think.  We consistently had cable or satellite starting from when I was ten in 1996.  I didn't see a lot of the classic cartoons as a kid and had to watch them on YouTube as an adult.  The cartoons we watched, or rather my sisters forced on me, were Loony Tunes and Popeye and stuff like that, as well as PBS.  I had trouble with those because of having no eyesight, as they don't have a lot of dialogue.  I actually enjoyed watching the ads more.  Occasionally I got to see Inspector Gadget, which I loved the theme song of, but not very often.  Was that on cable?

I didn't have anything my family was a cord never.

@Bluegrassbaby86 Inspector Gadget was on the regular networks first then on the cable channels in syndication.

Myself I grew up mainly with the standard analog antenna network channels 2 CBS, Channel 3 for Atari and Nintendo, 4 NBC, 5 ABC, 7 PBS national, 11 PBS local, 13 Fox, 14 KJAZZ, 30 WB. My uncle had cable and sometimes we would watch movies there. Twice we did get cable or at least a free trial run. We recorded every movie we could on vhs tapes and rewatched them endlessly when the subscription ran out. We also binge watched MTV music videos while it lasted.

@Bluegrassbaby86 also a buddy of mine who also happens to be blind could play the piano fantastically well. When we were kids we played name that tune with him pounding them out on the keys. Categories were like movies, television, cartoons, and the hard category. The hard category were things like jingles from commercials or the local news. It was maddening because the jingles were so familiar but sometimes so hard to place for the more obscure commercials.

Mr Magic wrote :

Cable.

I remember when I was a kid, we had a box that looked sorta like this.

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