The first telly I remember was b/w and had three channels and belonged to a neighbour. Provided the dog hadn't recently wazzed on the rubber plant that supported the aerial, in which case ITV was optional and then we only had BBC One and Two.
However, old school CRT screens could handle pans and zooms that my modern LG thing can only dream of. Then again the thing I'm watching now is comparatively huge and "waffer theeeen". A ~50" CRT would stick out from the wall about four feet and weigh enough that I'd be using some of the more robust Civil Engineering things I learned at college to fix it to the wall.
When I was a child it took a while to tune a TV by hand, channel by channel. Remember portables with the little aerials on the end of a wire? Then finding out that to watch the rugby today involved perching the TV on a chair near a window and the aerial held by long suffering (someone) holding it at a strange angle near the ceiling. You missed half the match faffing around.
My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s. I recall getting an Epsom FX80 dot matrix printer connected to our C-64 was quite traumatic and involved getting a Centronics (parallel) interface card made up and stuff. I still have the C-64 and it now has a USB interface.
Now I press the home button and pick a service on my TV. OK on my TV that isn't one of my RPi driven monsters that uses the MythTV backend. I have an Octo-LNB on my sat dish ...
(Sorry about this (twitch) but it's iPlayer and you were a child, not a kid)