1980 closed captioning demonstration

Shot this off the TV screen since this was the only way to show it here- this is a closed captioning demo loop that ran on ABC network broadcasts in early 1980- ABC was the first network to support captioning. Essentially if you had an outboard caption decoder when this was broadcast, since TVs didn't have them built-in until the 90s, this is what you'd see when you turned it on.

This was originally recorded on a Beta tape and I transferred it to DVD which is what's playing here- amazingly the caption signals are retained by the DVD recorder even though it creates a new vertical blanking interval. It's a pain to get it to display on current setups though- here I had to use the component outputs on the player and set the output to 480i in order for the TV to get the signal. Interestingly I've seen traditional-style closed captions on a few Blu-Ray discs, even though you have to downrez those to 480i to see them.

BTW the "Text" mode mentioned here was essentially another channel of captions, except that it was displayed on a black square covering the entire picture. ABC usually ran a schedule of all captioned programs on all channels for the week, since only a few shows were captioned at the time, but that ended by the late 80s. I never saw it used on any broadcasts during the 90s when I finally got a TV that could display captions. My new TV can't display the text channels at all, otherwise I'd show that here too.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• closedcaptions
• 1980s

[MattTheSaiyan]

I wish you could upload the whole Kodak commercial by itself, even without the captions.

[eyeh8nbc]

@MattTheSaiyan I'll try to put it up soon- this is from the animated "Return of the King" rebroadcast in May 1980 and has a lot of great kids/family type commercials. I don't have my own camera so I had a friend shoot this while he was here with it.

[eyeh8nbc]

@eyeh8nbc It's up now, BTW.

[seikogoldwatch2009]

Wrong, cunt. In 1993, the text appeared during NYPD Blue.

[foxxyloxx]

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG 1234567890

THIS IS ROW 15! THE VERY BOTTOM

All I have to say is, man I'd be pissed if I were deaf in the early 80s.

@eyeh8nbc Nice; I always wondered wth C2 was for. Now I know!

[SpongeSebastian]

@eyeh8nbc ABC has quite a few programs now that have Spanish subtitles in the CC2 feed.

[eyeh8nbc]

@sygo7g Caption 2 was meant to have captions in a 2nd language, but the only time I ever saw that used was Spanish translations during "60 Minutes" during the last couple analog years. Some of my 80s ABC recordings have a demonstration of closed captions on C2.

Sometime later they added captions 3 and 4 (also Text 3 and 4) but I don't know why since they didn't seem to be used at all.

[MattTheSaiyan]

@eyeh8nbc Cool.

[eyeh8nbc]

@sygo7g They weren't doing this in '83 as a good number of shows were captioned by then, but check caption "C2" if your TV has it- they sometimes put other stuff on that. Some new TVs still support Text, even though nobody's used it in a long time (I have a couple demo laserdiscs for Mitsubishi TVs, made in the 90s that have a scrolling message on the Text channels saying something like "This is the text channel, there is no Text info on this disc.")