Earliest Known Portland Cable Teletext Footage — 1980

Cable TV used to have a channel about its channels — a teletext schedule that scrolled endlessly. It was scored by radio or Muzak until 1989 when commercials and trailers began taking up the top half of the screen. As time went on and the technology to browse your own schedule became more common, the schedule kept taking less and less of the screen, until the early 2010s when TV Guide Channel was replaced with Pop, and the schedule vanished entirely.

This is the earliest footage I’ve ever seen of a teletext schedule channel, found on a home taping of the NBC miniseries “Shogun” along with a couple other tidbits (unfortunately what you see is it — all ads were cut out). Until I saw this, I had no evidence that cable TV was even available in Portland at the time.