We had a neighbor, who always had better and newer gadgets than my parents, and their family room TV had a remote. But it was corded! It must've had a 25 foot long cord tying it to the TV, and if I recall, you could only access on/off and go up or down one channel at a time. No punching in direct channel numbers on that one, that I can recall.
Being in the Philly 'burbs, the channels I remember at the time were 3, 6, 10, and 12 on VHF, and then 17 and 29 on the UHF tuner, which were still separate knobs through at least the 1980's. So channel surfing on that remote, with a manual tuner knob clicking thru all of those channels one at a time, could take more time than just getting off the couch and spinning the knob.
Then we all got these. Never learned if this particular box model was a local thing (they were made here near Philly), or if the rest of the country had the same thing sitting on their TV's:
View attachment 792933
Every 13 year old boy knew that if you'd go to the far right button, throw the row selector to the bottom row, and wind the fine-tune all the way in one direction, you could pull in Playboy channel pretty well.