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 :-)
