The station first signed on the air on September 1, 1965. Founded by Illiana Telecasting, the first program ever broadcast on WTWO was NBC's morning news program "Today", which aired at 7:00 that morning. WTWO, whose call letters were originally assigned to what is now fellow NBC affiliate WLBZ in Bangor, Maine, from 1954 to 1958, originally operated as a primary NBC affiliate with a secondary affiliation with ABC; it carried ABC network programs either on tape delay or by airing them live from the network feed through occasional preemptions of NBC programs (the most notable preemption being the 1967–1969 science fiction series "").