Finance History|Nasdaq MarketSite — Seven Dollars for Four Hundred Thirty Thousand Cable Shares

People treat Comcast as a Philadelphia media house that always printed CMCSA against a cable-plus-studio book.

The 1972 issuer was a Pennsylvania corporation renamed from American Cable Systems only three years earlier.

Comcast's own shareholder FAQ dates the initial public offering to 29 June 1972 and records 430,000 shares issued at 7 dollars each in 1972 currency.

Paul Kagan's Cable TV Financial Databook later put the same sale at 3.010 million dollars gross, underwritten by Butcher and Sherrerd.

Ralph Roberts had bought the first system, 1,200 subscribers in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1963. The public company was still that operator, scaled.

The common listed on Nasdaq under CMCSA. A closely held Class B line, later concentrated in Brian Roberts's vehicles, never joined the public book.

The 2002 combination with AT&T Broadband created a new parent and left the 1972 issuer as a subsidiary. The ticker survived the reorganization.

The mechanism is a small-system cable offering priced before the industry's leverage wave. Holders bought subscribers and a pole plant, not a broadcast network.

Nasdaq MarketSite at 4 Times Square opened in 2000, twenty-eight years after this print. The pin is that public facade, the later face of the electronic market that took the 1972 order. Interior studios are not a visitor floor.

Photo: Luca Marfe, June 2015, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Nasdaq MarketSite.