You didn't select cable channels with the tuner, though. My recollection is that you attached the cable box to the TV, tuned the TV to whatever channel was used to display hardline input, then selected channels on the cable box.
Eventually cable-ready TVs came out with the cable selector built-in, but they still weren't using the radio tuning mechanism to select hardline cable channels.
> You didn't select cable channels with the tuner,
That heavily depended upon what the CATV provider did in your area. In many areas, TV channels 2-13 were transmitted verbatim on the coax, and could be tuned by a NTSC TV just by hooking up the coax (usually via an impedance matching transformer) to the antenna inputs of the TV.
This, of course, did create a 'leakage' problem. If the coax leaked somewhere, people without cable got ghosting. But worse, if the TV picked up some of the over the air signal (quite common actually) that was on the identical frequency, you got ghosting even with CATV.
Eventually cable-ready TVs came out with the cable selector built-in, but they still weren't using the radio tuning mechanism to select hardline cable channels.