[julie_m]

Well, if you know your video game history, the original NES has a pretty good claim to be the direct spiritual descendant of the Atari 7800 (and therefore, 2600) consoles. Atari and Nintendo had worked together on a copyright-abuse scheme to lock out independent developers from producing their own cartridges for the 7800's successor (although Atari did not stay in the game long enough to make use of it), and the 8-bit processor in the NES is an evolution of the MOS 6502 which (in cut-down 6507 form) powered the 2600.

I don't know about the situation in Canada, but certainly in the UK portable TVs -- especially colour ones; for a long time, "portable" pretty much implied "monochrome" -- were fairly expensive items; enough for it to have been normal to hold on to one for as long as it worked, so the NES might not really be such a major anachronism.