"(CNN) -- The inventor of the TV remote, Eugene Polley, died on Sunday at 96.
After his death was announced on Tuesday, the Internet paused -- get it? -- to remember the man and the wireless television remote control, which ushered in the era of channel surfing and couch potatoes.
Some tributes were humorous. Others were fawning.
"Gush all you want about Facebook, Twitter and other recent tech innovations. I'd stack Polley and his TV remote against all of them," wrote David Lazarus at LATimes.com. "After all, which would you be more willing to give up -- Facebook or your remote? ... Thought so."

The early versions used a flash of light to communicate with the TV set, and sometimes other sources of light mistakenly changed the channel.

Our first TV when I was a kid didn't have a remote, but my dad had us sit next to it on Sundays so we could switch the channels between football games. The television was down in the finished basement in its own room, not in the living room. We'd get pretty bored, but enjoyed the commercials, of which I'm betting there were a lot fewer than there are now.

We didn't get to watch much of our own television shows - only 1 1/2 hours on Sunday nights, but we'd sneak in some time when my parents weren't home. One of our favorites was the old Perry Mason mysteries show. I can still hear the theme music in my head. Poor Hamilton Berger the district attorney! He never won.

There are a lot of shows we never saw, but did a little catching up as adults via reruns.

At some point, my dad bought a color television with remote. The channel changing involved two buttons: Up and Down. This meant slogging through each channel in turn on the way to the one you wanted. But it could be set up to ignore some of the channels, and my dad didn't like educational programs (just football and the Friday Night Fights), so he set it up to go past the public television station, so it was hard for us to get to it in order to watch the ballet.