The 8008 was: Blinky lights WAS: The SR71 Blackbird was designed ENTIRELYwith slide rules 659

Wrong. ATSC fits into a 6 MHz channel quite nicely. You may be confusing rules regarding adjacency with rules regarding occupied bandwidth.

In brief, it goes that "A station has to color inside the lines, but we're going to arrange licenses, such that no market has two adjacent stations, because building a receiver that can cope with a strong adjacent channel is Really Hard."1

Fifty years after those rules were written, the state of the art in television receiver design has improved, but the buttignment guidelines are still with us.

If you look at a dense metropolitan area, you will notice there are no adjacent VHF buttignments. The "big" cities (New York, San Francisco) get 2,4,5,7,9,11 and 13 while the "small" cities (Sacramento) get 3,6,8,10 and 12.

"But, four and five are adjacent" I hear you cry.

Not even close.

Channel 4 is from 66 to 72 MHz, while channel five is from 76 to 82, with some other services tucked into the 4 MHz gap between them.

Up in the UHF (470+ band), selectivity was even worse, so the stations

For example, San Francisco, which had (when I was a pup) 14, 20, 26, 32, 38, 44, and 50. (Although KFTY Ch. 50 is in Santa Rosa).

Nearby San Jose got stations such as 36, 42 (which was actually out in the East bay somewhere), 48, 54, and 60 (San Mateo).

There are dozens of curiosities like Fresno, California which has 18, 24, and 30 but then jumps to pick up 47, 53, and 59.

1 So, how does Cable TV work? There you have stations jammed up against each other from one end of the spectrum to the other. The answer is: VERY careful management of signal levels - basically every amplifier in the system has to be self-adjusting to maintain perfect balance of visual and aural carriers.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Computer software consists of only two components: ones and zeros, in roughly equal proportions. All that is required is to sort them into the correct order.