What Is WebTV? | Hacker News Reader

What Is WebTV?

goblin-heart.net

138 pointsjoebig66 comments

I convinced my very broke single mom to get a webtv when I was 10 or so. We didn’t have a PC. It was magical, and pushed that thing as far as I could with playing weird browser based multiplayer games and chat rooms and all sorts of stuff. It was my first Internet connected device and how I got my start with tech despite being from a pretty poor family.

So for the developers who worked at WebTV, thanks from one (now) developer to another. I might not have become who I am today without it!

You lucky; in Europe we didn't have cheap option like these and PC's were expensive anywhere in the world. Even in early 00's I used to use httrack to download sites from a cybercafé to be read offline in my PC at home.

An extremely tangential personal anecdote -

I learned about WebTV while writing essays for my college applications more than ten years ago. I had stumbled on this memorial site[0] for an engineer at WebTV named Jos who passed well before his time. The site includes some of his college essays[1] as well as some other bits of writing like his guide to OOP programming[2] (complete with Spanish and Portuguese translations !). His writing style and sense of humor have stuck with me for years and years now, and I still visit the site to have a laugh. Seemed like a very dynamic individual, and I'm grateful to his family for keeping his memory alive.

[0]: https://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/

[1]: https://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/college/index...

[2]: https://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/oop/index.htm...

Thanks for links. A very sad death

I worked at WebTV after it was acquired by Microsoft. My officemate was a dev that fixed browser crashes on the box. 90% of them were for porn sites. Which meant that he was paid by Microsoft to visit porn sites all day

I'm sure he had better connectivity than all the people on dialup using WebTV.

It's surprising that they never shipped V.92 support for most of these devices, you would think that saving tens of seconds would be a boon for an appliance product like this.

Has there been any work done to put old WebTV clients to use?

Not that I’m aware of. It was a nice code base, but all very custom. Even the network stack was custom. I would think companies could get a lot more adopting all the open stuff available now.

It did have a life for several years after I left in MSNTV. Maybe someone else here knows its fate.

> Which meant that he was paid by Microsoft to visit porn sites all day

Did Microsoft have a written mandate to improve the performance of these websites? How was this communicated?

No, not at all. His job was just to fix crashes. He would go through the logs and they just all happened mostly be porn sites. We used to joke that his job was to visit porn sites, but it was among a small group of developers. I wasn’t even sure of his direct manager was aware. But he was in fact being paid by Microsoft to visit porn sites :-)

I worked for an ISP that supported WebTV during this era, as third shift tech support.

The vast majority of my calls were from people (drunkenly) complaining that the internet was "busted". Typically the entire internet being down to them was actually code which meant that a certain porn site didn't work on WebTV.

They almost always hung up before admitting the actual problem. When they didn't, I wished they had.

ziplink??

No, it wasn't ziplink, but it would be less than professional to name them even if it were.

I worked at WebTV not long after the acquisition. I was always impressed with the amount of capability they were able to extract out of such minimalist hardware. Even for their time they had a slow CPU and tiny amount of RAM but managed to have a bespoke UX that was even capable of rendering Flash-based sites.

Even in the late 90s there was a community of WebTV hackers. One thing people focused on was the “tricks menu”[1] that required typing in a password to get into it. There were all kinds of conspiracy theories about what the codes “meant”. The reality was they were just chosen to be something easy to remember that could be typed with only one’s left hand on those IR keyboards.

[1] http://wiki.webtv.zone/mediawiki/index.php/Services/Gallery/...

Ha, nice! For those who don't get the references, "Hello, citizen!" and "Remember, the computer is your friend" are quotes from the tabletop RPG Paranoia, which of course features an all-controlling computer which is decidedly not your friend.

I worked at WebTV before it was public… back when it was called Artemis Research and had a website that proclaimed we did research in sleep deprivation of rabbits (there was a pet bunny rabbit that wandered the office, occasionally making a mess of things).

I love how wonderfully weird the web was back then! Such a different world; so hard to explain today to those who didn’t know it. And an incredibly talented team.

WebTV became the foundation for Microsofts hardware biz, and is responsible for the Xbox. If you go back farther. Artemis was responible for the Xband modem and is largely repsonsible for online gaming as a whole.

But most importantly how's the bunnies?

A couple fun facts. Founder Steve Perlman sold WebTV to Microsoft for half a billion. Steve later saved a struggling pre-Google Android from being evicted by bringing his friend Andy Rubin $10k in cash[0], refusing a stake in the company.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...

Andy Rubin was also a very early WebTVer; probably one of the first two or three employees, and was there through the Microsoft acquisition.

Andy Rubin also was a founder of Danger Inc. which was also eventually acquired by Microsoft.

Unfortunately the acquired talent that brought us the wonderful Hiptop/Sidekick devices were then wasted by being sucked into the Kin boondoggle.

WebTV licensed a bunch of music from me (XM/MOD) but then got acquired by Microsoft before they got around to paying me, and Microsoft didn't pay me either.

Somebody managed to extract them years later from an MSNTV and luckily I was able to recover a couple of songs I had lost.

https://turdinc.kicks-ass.net/Msntv/msnMusic/PlusBGmusic_v25...

Speaking of WebTV music, I was a huge fan of the original Philips WebTV dialing music. Sometimes I would just let it loop in the background when I was doing housework. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brZYWcGgg4Y Perhaps unsurprisingly, a couple of years later I started listening to a lot of music in the Demoscene.

Did you have anything to do with the track "as-dream"? That's my absolute favorite, it's a 20-something minute long ambient track.

WebTV was a literal godsend for a grandmother that insisted on caring for a grandfather and would not put him in a nursing home. It was her visual and intellectual portal to the rest of the world. She was college educated and far more world travelled than most even today. I can still remember slowly tapping out emails on that remote control. But, dammit, $200 box, tv you already owned, and a cheap dial up service and you were good to go. We did eventually move her to laptops and the like but that WebTV got her through 2-3 years of hell on earth.

I bought a WebTV for my dad back in the late 90s to show him what the internet is.

He went straight to a mail-order-bride website and destroyed his life.

Ugh - I'm so sorry, both for you and for him.

On top of that, "WebTV" was back before the Internet was a thing and before anyone realized how the Internet can be dangerous. I'm sure it was hard for everyone else to understand or have compassion for him (and you).

I'm sorry for you both.

HEH - no worries. That was the arc of his life. I got one for my mom too, and then she moved to Switzerland and entirely re-invented herself at 50. Everyone has a different path.

I feel bad for not feeling bad that I laughed at this. Every. time.

OMG you have NO idea how twisted it got in the end. I should write a book.

Suffice it to say he died under mysterious circumstances in a foreign country and the state department never determined a cause of death.

I want to read this book.

What?? I already wanted to know more from your first comment.

Reminds me of https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/17/thailand.famil...

Yep.

I may not read your book, but I'd read a long HN comment about this.

Just please remember that is not your fault. It would have happened anyways.

Best comment on HN so far.

Heres to the boomers who got zapped on contact with the new world due to a lack of immune response, just like the Aztecs and the native Indians!

These were pretty decent, not too terrible, and could be set up to dial normal ISPs. They filled a niche with older customers and/those who had zero computer experience but wanted to check email and browse web pages back in the 90s. They didn't last long enough to bridge the gap to the tablet era, so I'm guessing a lot of people finally had to learn a computer.

I do remember playing some MIDI files on it and realizing how good it sounded compared to my basic SoundBlaster 16, which made me go out and get a SB AWE32.

> and could be set up to dial normal ISPs.

oh for real? I hope some of the nostalgia tech youtubers can set one up (with their own ISP) and demo it. that would be cool.

https://youtu.be/NjteQv6oYgA?si=wOFf5agmNooR1Cl4

One of the first that popped up putting "webtv" in YouTube ;)

They could also be reconfigured, via a specially crafted email, if I recall correctly, to call 911. A huge proportion of these boxes were in a handful of zip codes in Florida, and once the exploit started spreading, a few PSAPs got hosed until a fix could be developed

WebTV largely worked better than I think it often gets credit for, and I echo the sentiment elsewhere that it felt "futuristic" in a sense. I had a Windows desktop, but we came into possession of a Philips WebTV box since my father was in sales and his company had a catalog of sales incentive items you could get for meeting sales targets. I really did not want use AOL like it seemed everyone else did, and the WebTV subscription was pretty reasonable compared to other options. We had the version with the hard drive and wireless keyboard. The hardware was really pretty decent- the keyboard was ok, I could print with it, and the feature I thought that really set it apart was the ports for video capture. I don't think they ever implemented a good way to use that capability for video, but I used it to capture screenshots from our family camcorder and attach them to email or post them on the webtv personal "website" or print them.

My early use of eBay was through WebTV, with both buying and selling, and it largely worked. You could browse webrings and read email from the couch!

Most of all, the dialing music was fantastic and I still listen to it once in a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brZYWcGgg4Y

When free ad-supported dialup services came around (Juno, Bluelight, NetZero) I alternated using those and WebTV for a while. As pages moved away from simple text/table/image based sites, page rendering quality unsurprisingly degraded. I think the version we owned had some Flash support but it was slow.

Looking back on it, it's impressive how legible text was on a 20" CRT TV in the interface (through S-Video). It was more usable than some modern "smart" TV interfaces.

There's a blast from the past! I worked for some years with Viewcall Canada, that had a very similar sort of service called BeyondTV. Same sort of box, more or less, and we did a bunch of work to basically import content from some providers to our NTSC-friendly interface. People could still get to the rest of what passed for the internet at the time, but they'd use our CGI-based email and menus for their starting point.

I recall that we eventually got a WebTV in the office to play with as well; we'd been at things for a while, but I think the writing was on the wall when the competition was backed by the MS Borg.

I never had a WebTV or MSN TV, but I always liked to watch the stupid infomercial, which I frequently did as a little kid. Then I got a Dreamcast, which had similar technology built in if you used the “internet” disc or whatever (I even had the official Dreamcast keyboard), and I realized how awful the whole experience was in 1999, especially compared to the Windows 98 computer I had in my bedroom, roughly 3 feet from the TV with the Dreamcast.

I do remember in the early 2000s when I was a high school student working at Best Buy, trying to help an older man get a replacement for his WebTV that he had a warranty for. I think we might have still sold an Ultimate TV model for him to get, but I don’t remember the specifics. What I do remember was how much he loved and used that thing, in a way that was fairly shocking to me, given how slow and unoptimized the systems were by then. I’m hoping I was able to convince him to spend his $500 credit or whatever on some eMachines package that would honestly still been a piece of shit, but would have been way better than the primitive low-memory WebTV, but who knows. That man loved that WebTV. That was one of the first times I got to see just how change-averse people can get when it comes to technology, and in retrospect, situations like that one helped me develop empathy for users.

Fun fact: in Japan there was a WebTV client for the Dreamcast [0]. The very first “Dreamcast” I saw was a Katana dev kit at a WebTV office.

[0]: https://wiki.webtv.zone/mediawiki/index.php/WebTV_for_Dreamc...

oh that is super cool! Yeah, Microsoft did the OS for Dreamcast so I guess it makes sense that there could have been an attempt to port the WebTV experience to the console. Also, this sent me down a rabbit hole that makes me want to try to get a broadband adapter for my Dreamcast, as dumb as that would be, so thank you for this, but also f-you (affectionate -- I'm genuinely thankful to remember the fun I had as a young teenager with the most underrated video game console of all time).

I nodded off watching this great Michael MJD video unboxing and setting up an original WebTV last night[0].

He plays around with an ongoing project to reverse-engineer and re-implement WebTV servers for self-hosting[1].

[0] https://youtu.be/NjteQv6oYgA

[1] https://github.com/zefie/zefie_wtvp_minisrv

I got my first computer when I was about 4, so when I was 10 I was already pretty familiar with them. So my dad's friend asked me to help him buy one of those beasts . I helped him set everything up and hook him up with a dial up connection but even for then the thing was awful. The browser was generic and did not render HTML properly (I was a IE user and fan back then); I mean, there was some divergences between Netscape and IE but both of those would render a page similarly, not this abomination. For instance, I remember it couldn't handle frames (which was a big deal back then). They were way cheaper than a real PC for sure, at least here in Brazil.

Gosh, I wish there was an archive of WebTV sites. I built my first website when I was 9 or 10 in WebTV. If only I could visit it today...

WebTV actually had a really neat sound system. They were one of the first clients of Headspace Inc (later Beatnik) which was started by Thomas Dolby because he felt there was a lack of tools to create interactive computer audio. Before WebTV they worked on the soundtrack

Headspace created the RMF file format, conceptually a mix between an SMF and a tracker song (XM, S3M) featuring compressed or low bitrate integrated patches, which was later used as the ringtone format for almost every flip/feature phone in the 2000s (notable examples include the T-Mobile Sidekick/Danger Hiptop and most by Nokia).

That remote control is amazingly simple for 1998. It foreshadows IP streaming box remotes that today stand in contrast to the "747 cockpit" remotes of cable boxes and TVs.

WebTV founder Steve Perlman went on to fund OnLive [0], one of the early video game streaming startups that later went bankrupt. Some ex-OnLive, ex-WebTV employees went on to start Google's Stadia which was axed because, 10 or so years later, there was still no market for video game streaming.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive

Oh! This brings back memories. WebTV was my first "computer". I learned "hacking" (re: HTML) on this thing! WebTV started my entire future as a Linux SysAdmin.

Cool, I worked on Network Computer that had a similar purpose but never reached comparative market success of WebTV. I guess ChromeOS is the modern successor of both.

Remind me of Teletext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext

Teletext it's an entire different thing. This was actual internet shown in TV. Teletext was almost like Gopher or some mini-newspaper showing up different subpages (100 the index, up to 999, but not all numbers were used, often >200 was for news, >300 for sports, and so on).

Teletext had no interactivity beside of the 'reveal' button for some simple newspaper-like puzzles.

EDIT:ok, it;s close, it used vblank interval times to send the signal, identical to the Teletext. In that case, yes, it's close, but with different technologies as the protocol, even if they shared the same medium.

Had a nonprofit whose major patron was a WebTV user; meaning they had to make sure their site layout worked on WebTV as a first priority. The version that guy had, no less: he bought an early one and didn't do much else with it.

When the day came that we no longer had to design for IE 3 (or whatever it was) plus the special cases of brain dead the "WebTV" broswer added to that, we were so happy. They hired someone to take over the site design and modernize it to DHTML and CSS. They had an Art degree, but had never seen HTML source or heard of CSS.

so the world goes.

I was at a shop where we literally bought a major customer a new PC so that we could deprecate IE 4.

We did the same with a client whose CEO used an OG iPad. Our analytics showed he was the only user on iOS 5, the final version supported by that model.

> they had to make sure their site layout worked on WebTV

They weren't big enough to benefit from the fact that one of the components of WebTV's architecture was an entire "page patching" database and proxy that would fix HTML from popular sites that didn't work correctly on their browser.

They were two folks talking about property rights.

WebTV was really cool back in the day. I have no idea what the purpose was. It just seemed very futuristic compared to other internet applications at the time.

The original post explains the purpose of WebTV, if you’re curious.

I actually work on an open-source project that recreates the functionality of a WebTV box for modern web browsers (although it isn't anywhere near done). Just thought y'all would like it :P

https://github.com/SKCro/WebTV-HD/

I worked on WebTV at a major television network. While I do have wonderful memories of the time I worked there, in the back of my mind I always wondered, "Who would use this?". Coding for it was essentially coding for a limited browser with a special tag for where the "TV" would go.

I haven't seen this page in years. Before I got my first computer, I had a webTV for about a year.

WebTV is probably why I now have a computer hooked to my TV

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