How did old CRT televisions display on screen menus and graphical overlays over analog video before digital video processing was a thing?

Question

TV’s from the 80’s and 90’s definitely weren’t digitizing incoming video and generating graphics. So how did they overlay things like the channel, volume, and menus?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Same way as they do now, just with an analog connection to the video “input” of the screen rather than a digital one. You would be controlling a digitally drawn menu, but the image was converted to analog and overlaid onto the analog signal.