American Broadcasting Company television. The fifth-oldest major broadcasting network in the world and the youngest of the Big Three television networks, ABC is often nicknamed as "The Alphabet Network", as its initialism also represents the first three letters of the English alphabet, in order. ABC launched as a radio network on October 12, 1943, serving as the successor to the NBC Blue Network, which had been purchased by Edward J. Noble. It extended its operations to television in 1948, following in the footsteps of established broadcast networks CBS and NBC. In the mid-1950s, ABC merged with United Paramount Theatres, a chain of movie
Library of American Broadcasting to its new location. Now housed in the Broadcasting Archives at the University of Maryland, the Library of American Broadcasting is a wide-ranging collection of audio/video recordings, books, pamphlets, periodicals, personal collections, photographs, scripts, and vertical files devoted exclusively to the history of broadcasting. LAB holds many collections of note, including the papers of Sol Taishoff, founder of the influential industry publication "Broadcasting"; the papers of Helen J. Sioussat, director of the Talks Department at CBS (1937–58); the scrapbooks of Edward J. Kirby, chief of the radio branch of the War Department in World War II; and the papers of