Technology History | Comcast — From 1,200 Tupelo Subscribers to a Philadelphia Tower
· 1963-11
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Technology History | Comcast — From 1,200 Tupelo Subscribers to a Philadelphia Tower
kevin
People treat Comcast as a Philadelphia glass shaft that was always a media holding company.
The first system was a community antenna in Tupelo, Mississippi.
On 13 November 1963, Ralph J. Roberts, a Philadelphia belt-and-suspenders manufacturer who had just sold Pioneer Industries, bought American Cable Systems from Jerrold Electronics for $500,000 in 1963 dollars.
The Tupelo plant had about 1,200 subscribers and a handful of channels carried by wire to houses that could not pull a clean broadcast off the air.
Daniel Aaron and Julian A. Brodsky, both Jerrold men, came with him.
Roberts later said people ran after the trucks asking for a hookup. The monthly fee was about five dollars.
In 1969 the company was renamed Comcast, a portmanteau of communications and broadcast, and incorporated in Pennsylvania. Headquarters moved to Philadelphia.
The 1972 Nasdaq listing used the ticker CMCSA. Growth after that was acquisition: Group W Cable, Storer, Scripps, Jones Intercable, then AT&T Broadband in 2002, which made Comcast the largest U.S. cable operator.
NBCUniversal followed in 2011.
The tower at 1701 John F. Kennedy Boulevard, designed by Robert A. M. Stern and opened in 2008, is the public face of that move north.
It is not the Tupelo shack. It is where the company chose to stand after it stopped being a single Mississippi system.
The mechanism is the community-antenna business itself: an antenna on a ridge, a cable down the street, a monthly bill for a signal the air would not deliver. Scale came later. The first 1,200 homes were the whole book.
Photo: Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Comcast Center from City Hall, 2020).
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