Electronic Program Guide for Cable TV (1983)

[Michael]

Here's a blast from the past and something I never thought I'd see again... It's a rather poor quality video recording of United Video's Electronic Program Guide (EPG) from February 1983. The first couple hundred EPG character generators used Apple-II system boards. I was contracted to write the EPG firmware in 1982 by a small start-up company in St. Clair Shores, Michigan that manufactured the EPG character generators for United Video.

Manhattan Cable TV Program Guide

United Video would upload 24 hours of TV listing data for each EPG via the WGN satellite uplink they operateded in Chicago. The listing data was super-imposed onto one of the horizontal scan lines within the vertical blanking interval of the WGN signal and the data would be recovered or extracted from the signal and converted to RS-232 serial data for the EPG at each cable company "head end" using a sync-interval decoder.

I also designed a simple real-time-clock board for use in the EPG character generators.

Seeing this video brings back some great memories... including almost getting sued by TVData (a Scripps-Howard company), but that's another story (grin).

Cheerful regards, Mike