The name Bill Kastner may not be familiar but you probably know his work. He’s the guy who came up with the equipment that makes closed captioning on television possible. Bill earned his masters degree in electrical engineering from K-State before working for Texas Instruments. That’s where he designed original closed captioning decoder. Bill did everything but create the interface to the television set. Fellow employee Joe Lynn did that. It was the mid 1970’s and Public Broadcasting asked Texas Instruments to come up with a device that would let deaf viewers read what was being said on air. In July of 1993, the FCC declared that all TV’s 13 inches or larger must have a closed caption decoder built into them.
