Chyron Corporation (Specimen)

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The Chyron Corporation develops and manufactures on-screen graphics for the broadcast industry. The company was founded in 1966 by Francis Mechner and the late Eugene Leonard. The company's original name was Digitronics. They produced the first electronic scoreboard for the former Roosevelt Raceway harness track in Garden City, New York.

In the early 1970s, the name was changed to Systems Resources Corporation and was located in Plainview, NY only a few miles from the company's present location in Melville. They began manufacturing dot-matrix (5x7) character generators (CG) for airport arrival and departure time displays. They also began manufacturing a clean-looking fixed-font (rom based) CG sold as the Chiron I. It featured the ability to record and retrieve lower thirds and full page text displays for news departments of TV stations as an alternative to art cards, slides or scrolling black felt.

As the newly developed IBM and Memorex 8" floppy disk drives were not yet available for OEM purchase, the company built their own multi-track magnetic storage device, the VidiLoop, based on a two foot loop of computer tape in a thick clear plastic housing.

The Chiron II was an ambitious CG project that featured up to six loadable fonts (typefaces) with, for the time, very high video resolution. The display circuits were running so fast (27ns) that the fastest ICs available were used and had to be hand selected during manufacture as not all samples were up to par. It was also their first unit to incorporate a 16-bit mini-computer known as the DataMate-70. That processor's code base was used in the Chyron IV and 4100 series systems, which were the work horses of the mobile sports graphics industry from the late 1970s through most of the 1980s. Programs and fonts were loaded from loop or disk into computer style magnetic core memory. As the font data access needed to be done quicker than a single core memory could achieve, four core boards were used in parallel to provide faster access. It was also the first CG that had non-monospaced fonts with adjustable inter-row and inter-character spacing.

All of that capability came at a cost too dear for many small market TV stations, and so a spin-off of a project for NBC became the Chiron III (later IIIB); a less capable system that was adequate for many TV news departments was developed and sold. It became the first mobile graphics systems of ABC Sports under Roone Arledge. It was he who pushed the increased use of graphics in sports to what it is today; a significant portion of live sports entertainment. The III's success provided the impetus for the Chyron IV, which was a modernized and reduced package size Chyron II, suitable for mobile use. It quickly replaced the Chyron IIIs as the dominant sports graphics system.

Around 1975 there was an added investor who would provide much needed capital. The reorganization plan included a name change to capitalize on the product's name recognition. The name Chiron was already registered in California, so by changing the i to a y they were able to keep the familiar sounding name and became initially Chyron Telesystems and later still Chyron, Corporation.


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Certificate: Common Stock, specimen, late 1900’s

Printer: Security-Columbian / United States Bank Note Company

Dimensions: 8” (h) x 12” (w)

State: NY-New York

Subject Matter: Modern Technologies | Computers and Related | Specimen Pieces

Vignette Topic(s): Female Subject | Skyline Scene | Computers/Technology

Condition: No fold lines, punch hole cancels in the signature areas and body, very crisp.