Yes Virginia, we had HBO in the 70’s. As you can see above, we got it in August of 1975. Does anybody remember ‘Martha’s Attic?” HBO used to be on only a few hours a day, mostly at night and would ‘sign off’ around 1 or 2 in the morning. They used to go on the air about 3:00 pm and the selections of movies were few. Believe me, you got to know them well.
It really changed the way we saw television, no commercials, a shock at the time. We had a converter box that allowed us to pick up the normal channels 2 thru 13 then you flipped a switch over and up popped HBO. Sex, violence and nudity, though I saw my first nude shot not on HBO, but on Public Television in 1973. A program called ‘Steambath’ with Valerie Perrine. Yep, became a big fan of Valerie Perrine. Couldn’t tell you the plot of that thing but I remember Valerie Perrine. 
But who needs Steambath, HBO had The Towering Inferno. And by December of 1975, there program guides were called On Air.
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HBO used to show sports from the L.A. Forum. During the 1976-77 season, they televised every home game of the L.A. Lakers and the NHL L.A. Kings. They even showed boxing and even a horse show from the Fabulous Forum. Jack Kent Cooke, the owner of the Forum and the Lakers was chairman of Teleprompter and he sold the games to Home Box office soon after they went national via satellite to cable systems. Before then they were distributed via microwave across parts of eastern Pennsylvania and suburbs of NYC. Then had the rights to all of the events at Madison Square Garden. Also they had ABA games from Nassau Coliseum. They even had a slate of Yankees games during the summer of 1975.
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