During the 1990s, everyone wanted to surf the information super-highway — also known as the World Wide Web or just ‘Internet’ — but not everyone was interested in getting on…

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).

  • Katherine 🪴@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    23 hours ago

    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.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      23 hours ago

      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.

      • Katherine 🪴@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        23 hours ago

        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.

        http://toastytech.com/guis/winmate2.html