On that date in these and many other American cities, the transition began from analog to digital television. It begins a revolution that will have spread to every American household with TV reception by no later than June 12th, 2009.
Ever since television sets became commercially available in the late 1930's the signals transmitted to our homes and businesses have come to us in 'analog' form.
Technicality aside, the idea is that a number of images are drawn across the screen of your monitor in rapid succession. You were basically receiving a high-speed version of a flip-picture book, where each page of the book contained a slightly different image from the one on the previous page.
Your TV monitor would flip through the images to create the illusion of movement. Because of this process there were occasional image 'skips' and other distortions.
Then digital television began to be developed, and in 1996 the U.S. Congress ordered all broadcast networks to begin preparations to switch their broadcasts over to digital.
