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.

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