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Our early '80's 19" Magnavox with a cable ready RAT would only go up to channel 36 when in CATV mode. That was fine until the cable company added channels above 36. For those channels, we used the VCR to tune the higher channels.
Years ago, I had a 19" Sylvania color hospital TV with a motorized single knob varactor tuner. Behind the control door, there was a switch to select between air and midband cable channels. This set had 6 or 8 positions above channel 13 that could be tuned to whatever channel was desired. When the switch was set to air, these positions tuned the standard UHF over-the-air channels. When set to midband, it tuned the midband cable channels.
I've seen some cheap sets (Emerson, Goldstar, etc) that had a 14-position varactor tuner that boasted something like "110 channel cable compatible". Of course, one couldn't tune in all channels at once. One had to decide what 14 channels they wanted to watch the most and set the tuner for those channels. These sets generally had a pushbutton for each channel position, along with a band select lever and thumbwheel tuning control for each channel position that was used to program the desired channel in each position.
I remember the Zenith TV's that had both cable ready and non-cable ready RAT's. The cable ready ones had green LED readouts and the non-cable ready ones had red LED readouts.
At present, I have a '79 RCA 19" colortrak that has a non-remote, non-cable ready RAT with red LED readout.
The oldest TV I've seen that had a RAT that would receive all unscrambled NTSC cable channels up to '36 was a '79 Zenith system 3. I think RCA made some TV's during the mid '70's that were "cable ready" by mid '70's standards. I think they had a single knob varactor tuner that would tune OTA VHF-UHF, as well as the midband cable channels.
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