- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
The most surprising thing (covered in the video at the bottom of the article) is that the MSN WebTV 2 has similar specs to the original Xbox. Major differences are lack of GPU as in the Xbox, Windows CE instead of a modified W2K, and twice the RAM (128 MB vs the Xbox’s 64).
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I remember the day my gram got one. By today’s standards, it might not be pretty great but when it first came out I thought it was super cool tech.
We never had one growing up but we did have a home PC. Like with AOL, all of the dial-up numbers were long distance so the costs to use it for any length of time would have been crazy. We basically had to wait another 2-3 years for a local dial-up company (basically 3 guys in the area bought a T1 line and a bank of modems) before there was a non-long distance number we could dial to get online.
Oh, gosh. Our first family PC was a Tandy Sensation and Winmate which had “In Touch”, the phone center and 11 year old me was fascinated with the idea of having different inboxes for all the family members with personalised greetings.
It never worked since we never actually hooked it up but I still pretended.
I have 3 of the original ones in my basement that my parents were going to throw out years ago that I rescued. They were pretty awful in every way but I always hoped to do something with them eventually.
Maybe with this I can make a lo-fi HomeAssistant dashboard / control panel and/or plumb in the Weather Channel emulator (https://weatherstar.netbymatt.com/)
That would be cool. I didn’t dive too deep into it, but the server project for it seems like you can configure the menus any way you want since they’re just HTML. You’d probably have to do server-side rendering or otherwise put all the HA API logic in the backend, but that could work!
I loooove that WeatherStar 4000 emulator and run a copy at home. It seems like it relies on Javascript so sadly may not play well with those old set top boxes. But if you get it working, please share.
I remember seeing commercials for this and thinking it was going to be the end of the internet as we knew it. It was the beginning of anyone being able to go online.
I thought they were a cool idea, at least conceptually. In practice, no one really wanted to read web pages or email from across the room on a fuzzy CRT.
