Apple's interactive television box: Hacking the set top box System 7.1 in ROM | Hacker News Reader

Apple's interactive television box: Hacking the set top box System 7.1 in ROM

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211 pointstodsacerdoti35 comments

This is so cool, there's nothing I love to read about more than someone spending insane amounts of time hacking some old piece of hardware that even when done will be completely useless in the modern era, for no other reason than "why not?".

This was an amazing read. As someone who spent a long time hacking 68k Macs, I laughed out loud when I came to “Moving or substantially altering this code in ResEdit has side effects, usually explosive ones”.

The cause of those "explosive" side effects is relocations. The JSRs aren't actually jumping to low memory (e.g. 0x000007DE); they're relative to the base of the CODE resource, and get fixed up at load time based on a list of offsets stored elsewhere. Move one of the JSR instructions, and suddenly the relocation gets applied to the wrong place.

In case anyone is interested, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVwrsnaWGDw is a promotional video for BT's 1995 trial of the boxes in the UK. More flashy promo that deep look at the UI though. The ability to download SNES games to a flash cart (~4:50) is perhaps one of the more intriguing bit of the service.

That was an Alice in Wonderland level of rabbit hole to fall down and a fantastic read about a device I never knew existed!

I wonder if something like Linux or NetBSD could be burned on to the ROM card to get the system into a more 'friendly' state for debugging the broken SCSI adapter the author mentioned

That picture with the developers just made it for me. Great read. The floodgap website read like quite the treasure trove as well, with the neatest showcase [1] of the author's collection.

Thanks for bringing it up!

[1] https://www.floodgap.com/etc/machines.html

I hope the magic of HN will bring one of the men in the photo to intervene here.

The person in the center is Peter Hoddie.

Came to say the same. Peter was a Quicktime engineer.

A coworker and I came across a stack of these machines in an abandoned lab at Apple's Infinite Loop Campus decades ago. We didn't know what they were although we were sure they were some kind of set-top box that Apple had abandoned. I feel like my coworker knew the code name but if he did, it escapes me now.

A young Bruce Leak (top left)?

A young Jim Batson (top center)?

Left center I think is Fred Huxham.

(author) I had a feeling HN would know who these people were. Anyone know which one was "Fred" (as in FredTVApp)?

(edit: looks like Fred Huxham per comment below)

The top row is Sean Allen, Jim Batson, and Mike Dodd. Center square is Peter Hoddie.

(Fun fact: Sean is why QuickTime Movie root atom container headers have a type value of `sean`.)

That explains the Sean joke I found elsewhere!

>it's somewhat surprising that only one Mac officially could boot the Mac OS entirely from ROM, namely the Macintosh Classic (hold down Cmd-Option-X-O to boot from a hidden HFS volume with System 6.0.3).

This is not actually true: one other Mac could do this -- the Powerbook 100 could boot into System 6.0.8 (going by memory: I owned one).

The PB100 was the entry-level model of the original Powerbook launch range, and differed from the other Powerbooks, the 140 and 170. The latter were 68030 machines, but the PB100 ran on a 68000 and was designed by Sony -- it was physically smaller and lighter than the other two but used a weird lead acid battery that could run it for something like 40-50 minutes. Not sure why it booted MacOS 6 from ROM, but I suspect it might originally have been designed as a floppy-only machine to save battery power relative to the hard disk model they shipped.

Before reading this, I didn't even know Apple had ever made a setop box before the more recent Apple TV.

The original Apple TV ran a modified OS X 10.4. Have one in my basement. :)

And to a degree, the latest one runs a modified iOS which is a modified macOS if you go back far enough.

Everything they make runs OPENSTEP, basically.

Just because this is my wheelhouse and I’ve been in it a long time I’m going to get pedantic.

An STB and OTT box are different - different video delivery mechanisms of IP vs. QAM.

This line got blurred however in the early to mid 2000s with IP based services.

The hard part of getting a box deployed outside of the Motorola and Scientific Atlantic boxes that ruled the early days of cable was a lack of standards of back office systems. So you couldn’t just build a box you had to have a whole stack for device provisioning etc.

I worked for a company Comcast bought in the early 2000s when they were buying up smaller regional systems and it was a mess trying to get everything aligned. It probably took 15 to 20 years until they finally ironed it all out. To be fair to Comcast they did a good enough job that they now license their X1 platform to other operators (Cox, Shaw, Quebecor)

Not quite the same, but there was also the Macintosh TV [1] - an all-in-one desktop Mac with a TV tuner - and the Pippin console [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_TV

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin

Shout out to the Quadra 605, my first Mac. Such a cool computer back in the day and relatively affordable at the time. Used it for many years later as a monitor stand too.

Were they really thinking that the phone companies would install T1 lines in everyone's house?

Not in a literal sense. The article mentions T1 probably not because literally expecting literal T-1 service on coax, but because T-1 used to be used as a metric of bandwidth. It's 24 standard voice circuits (12 and 24 being traditional groupings for voice circuits). It's approximately 1.5 mbit/s.

This is about the minimum bandwidth required to make standard definition MPEG-1 video work. That was by design -- it was the bandwidth of a 1x CD-ROM drive or a T1 line.

The phone companies eventually did provision that much bandwidth to each home. And not that much long after. DSL at 1 mbit/s was around by 1997.

The port on the back of the Apple STB is actually literally a T1/E1 port (even though it looks like TP Ethernet), with a Brooktree Bt8069-Series Line Interface Unit chip inside for a T1/E1 interface!

I'm not sure if there were T1 adapters for DSL etc back in the day, but I guess that's plausible (before the computer world won over the telecom world there were a lot of weird standards that looked like they would be adopted - ATM anyone?)

edit: Apparently T1 started being carried over HDSL which is probably what was being used here https://www.arcelect.com/HDSL3698.htm

I knew a few who got a T1 line "installed to (their) house" as the song goes. There was a quite spicy time very early on where many things seemed potentially reasonable (ISDN, T1, etc) before DSL and DOCSIS took over everything.

It's interesting to see how differently it all worked out in the US. I've never seen or heard about T1, I personally went from dial-up straight to Ethernet. Some people used to use ADSL. DOCSIS is also still a thing, but it's being replaced with better technologies (the slow uplink is meh).

For awhile "poor man's ISDN" was a thing with some local ISPs - you'd get something on your end that could shotgun multiple 56k modems, and they'd be able to bond them together.

Wasn't a T1 around $1,500 per month in 1995? Imagine using such expensive service to deliver... TV.

The one I knew the price of was about $450 a month (maybe in 98?) but that was because there was some local completion and ISPs as such already existed vs ISPs using the local telco monopoly.

(author) I had a residential T1 line for many years, and a friend of mine had one even earlier when most of us were still on dialup. It was certainly as possible as anything else was at the time.

I’m more shocked at the notion of the T1, HDSL or whatever being run all the way to this STB. Imagine 1.5Mbps of bandwidth straight to your house and only being able to use it with this one limited device!

But of course, the Web and lots of other goodies normal people might want to do online were not even close to mature yet. So this could plausibly be your only network-connected device. Wild.

Yes, the interactive TV stuff in the 1990s was kind of a bet against the Internet. It's amazing to me that multiple companies developed entire systems that were 10x-100x too expensive to bring to market; I guess they hadn't heard that too early is the same as wrong.

And in 1995 the total Internet bandwidth between the UK and the USA was basically a T1 IIRC.

Apple's early world dictator dreams -- expecting applause?

I liked that era Apple. Engineers called the shots, made things they would want.

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