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Homage to the Vidifont

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Eyes Of A Generation.com

In Case You Missed It…Another Look At The Vidifont System

On Saturday, I posted the first article on television’s first character generator, but here is a much more illustrated article on Vidifont that I think you’ll like. Thanks to James Shea for sharing this in the Comment section a day or so ago. By the way…if you are not paying attention to the Comments section of these posts, your are MISSING A LOT! That’s where most of the great detail comes in and in most cases, that rich flow of new information is typically from those that were there, and only they can add. I, and many others are forever grateful to the thousands of veteran broadcasters here that, in part, come here to pass along their experiences…it’s of benefit to us all. Enjoy, share and read the comments! -Bobby Ellerbee

http://jcbd.com/vidifont/

Homage to the Vidifont

He also details the economic considerations involved, where CBS basically determined they were spending so much money creating 35mm slides for namesupers (the hardware costs for the specialized camera itself were considerable) that they could easily recoup that and more by developing the Vidifont. I…

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4 responses to “Homage to the Vidifont”

  1. Kenneth Shapiro

    Flashback, very nice. My dad purchased one in the early 1970’s and rented back to CBS since they didn’t want to buy one for the Midwest region yet.

  2. Bobby Reyes

    …KMOL ( WOAI-TV ) had a Vidifont in the mid 80’s and I had to work it for their newscasts.

  3. Steven Davis

    We had a Vidifont Mk 1 when I first started at WPRI in 1976. For the 1978 elections I built a serial to parallel interface using a UART to connect the election computer system to the Keyboard port on the Vidifont. The keyboard port was similar to a centronics parallel port but it had a non standard pulse timing to strobe in the data. There was no buffer, so in order not to miss characters hardware handshaking was used. I remember Tabs and Centering were somewhat unpredictable, so in order to get right-justified vote tallies, the numbers had to be padded with Number Width and Comma Width spaces. We actually slowed down the baud rate to give a slow reveal effect on the screens.

  4. Rick Bozeman

    I started learning the Vidifont 1 in 1972 at WTVT in Tampa. Sparsely used at first but within a year I think it was being used for most of the newscast. Several years later we got a Chyron which was much more user friendly as I remember. The old b& w camera used for super cards. and the associated bins and cards were relegated to the trash pile.

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