[quote name=\'Strikerz04\' post=\'139347\' date=\'Dec 2 2006, 11:40 AM\']
I didn't know WSNS (or Telemundo) was actually english speaking. My earliest memory of this station was when I was watching Basta! in the early 90's.
[/quote]
WSNS started in 1970 with "Instant News" -- an alphanumeric news/weather/sports/stock ticker format, 18 hours a day. For the last 10 or 15 minutes a night, before sign-off, the ticker would be handed over to a group of hippies, and the title would become "Underground News".
After several months, live programming began to show up, little by little, a half-hour at a time. "Underground News" went live, and there was a regular newscast with human anchors. There were nightly talk shows about the supernatural, horse racing, motor sports, and anything else a producer could sell to the management.
None of that really worked out, but things started to click when the station bought the rights to the Sox, the Bulls and the Blackhawks. And for a while, it became the "Leave It to Beaver", "I Love Lucy", and "High Chaparall" rerun channel. Lots of cartoons, too.
They experimented with over-the-air subscription movies -- something called "OnTV". You'd get a set-top converter box that would descramble the signal. They spent many, many years fighting license challenges, because the scrambler at the transmitter didn't always work right, and kiddies could often see soft porn (Oh no! My six-year-old saw titties! She's ruined!) for several seconds at a time, until the scrambler kicked in again.
Then they took it Spanish language. I don't remember what year that was -- might have been '83 or '84.
It was a fun place to work, and to learn the art. I often told people that the station was so small and so low-budget, if somebody wanted to vacuum the carpets, we'd have to unplug the transmitter first.
I can still thread-up one of them old RCA quad VTR's (two-inch tape on -- IIRC -- 16-inch reels) in my sleep.
PS -- Who are you calling a "Basta"?