Short answers, pulled from the story.
NTSC stands for National Television System Committee. The committee was established in 1940 by the FCC to resolve competing corporate proposals for a nationwide analog television standard, and it published its first technical standard for black-and-white television in March 1941.
The first publicly announced NTSC compatible color network broadcast was an episode of NBC's Kukla, Fran and Ollie on the 30th of August 1953, viewable in color only at NBC headquarters. The first nationwide color viewing came on the 1st of January 1954, with the coast-to-coast broadcast of the Tournament of Roses Parade.
That frequency was chosen so that the chrominance signal's components would fall between the luminance signal's components in the frequency spectrum, allowing black-and-white sets to ignore the color signal with minimal interference. Because precision frequency dividers of the 1953 era could not generate it cleanly, engineers built it as a composite of small integers: 5 times 7 times 9 MHz divided by 8 times 11.
The CBS system was incompatible with existing black-and-white sets; it reduced scan lines from 525 to 405 and used a spinning color wheel. RCA used legal action to delay its commercial use, and the Office of Defense Mobilization banned color-set production in October 1951 during the Korean War. CBS formally withdrew its system in March 1953, and the FCC approved the NTSC compatible color standard on the 17th of December 1953.
Never The Same Color was a backronym used by video professionals and television engineers to mock NTSC's susceptibility to color drift. Vacuum-tube electronics through the 1960s allowed reception problems to shift the phase of the color burst, altering hue balance, which is why NTSC sets were fitted with a manual tint control.
Most full-power NTSC over-the-air transmissions in the United States ended on the 12th of June 2009, after a deadline originally set for February 17 of that year was moved. Low-power stations faced a 2015 cutoff, with some Channel 6 stations allowed to operate until the 13th of July 2021 under an FCC extension.