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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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'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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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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!
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...
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.
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/...
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?
It did have a life for several years after I left in MSNTV. Maybe someone else here knows its fate.
Did Microsoft have a written mandate to improve the performance of these websites? How was this communicated?
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...
Unfortunately the acquired talent that brought us the wonderful Hiptop/Sidekick devices were then wasted by being sucked into the Kin boondoggle.
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...
He went straight to a mail-order-bride website and destroyed his life.
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.
Suffice it to say he died under mysterious circumstances in a foreign country and the state department never determined a cause of death.
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!