[8][9] The National Captioning Institute was incorporated on January 30, 1979, with millions of dollars of start-up funding from the federal government.

[1][2][10] On March 23, 1979, the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare announced plans for closed-captioning of twenty hours per week of television shows.

[13] The National Captioning Institute's work first became publicly well known on March 16, 1980, when ABC, NBC, and PBS collectively introduced closed-captioning of their television shows.

[17] Rosalynn Carter hosted a reception at the White House honoring the work of the National Captioning Institute on March 19, 1980.

Later that year, ABC's "World News Tonight" was the first regularly-scheduled program to be real-time captioned.

[21] In 1989, the NCI partnered with ITT to develop the first caption-decoding microchip to be built directly into new television sets in the factory.

[20] In 1993, a federal law went into effect that required built-in capacity to display captions on all televisions 13 inches or larger, which would make purchasing separate decoders no longer necessary.

[...] [Judge Robert Ringler] ordered NCI to cease and desist all unlawful practices, rescind illegal and overbroad policies, and offer the two fired workers reinstatement with full back pay, plus interest.