When I saw that Microsoft was discontinuing WebTV on September 30th, my first reaction was, “WebTV is still around?”. I imagine that many of you have never even heard of WebTV, later known as MsnTV, but for me it was my first experience with having the internet in my home. I couldn’t afford a computer and could only get on the internet by going to college with my girlfriend and using her login to surf the internet in the computer lab. I would spend hours there just absorbing as much as I could and trying to think of things to look up. In case you were wondering, yes, nudity was all over the internet from the beginning. That’s how I got banned from the computer lab, but that is a story for another time.
With no way to connect to the internet anymore, and no money for a computer, I stumbled across WebTV and it was the perfect solution. I had a TV, I had a phone line, and I had $300, so I bought it and the wireless keyboard and went home to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpIm8BNe8-o
Sure, it looks archaic now, but waiting 3-4 minutes or longer to connect was the way it was 20 years ago. That tune is buried into my brain and just hearing it really takes me back to life as a twenty something slacker still living at home.
Now, WebTV wasn’t perfect. There was no mouse, so you had to navigate using just the keyboard and sometimes that caused problems. Text would be highlighted with boxes and you selected it by hitting the enter key. The box itself had very little processing power and you couldn’t download anything. However, I had an e-mail address for the first time and I could participate in chat rooms. Chat rooms were like the Twitter of the early 90′s. You log-in and everybody just talks at once. It was near impossible to keep up, but it was incredibly cool to be talking with people from different places in real time. It was addicting and, believe it or not, very fun. I joined a Star Trek chat room and met several really cool people that shared a common interest. This was revolutionary to me because I had very few friends that I could talk to about Star Trek, Star Wars, comics, etc and the internet joined me together with “my people”. Eventually, chat rooms gave way to social networks, but the concept of meeting people and sharing interests was the same then as it is now.
After a while, I saved enough money to buy an actual PC and replaced my WebTV with an eMachines PC that, looking back, seems even more outdated than the WebTV. That thing was a piece of crap, but I was able to download photos and those cutting edge .midi files of classic TV themes. My WebTV was sold in a yard sale for mere pennies and I never once thought I would look back on it someday with the fondness I am feeling now.
I’m sure trying to use one now, if even possible, would be annoying and destroy all these fond memories so I won’t even try. Join me for a moment of silence for a fallen friend. RIP WebTV, thanks for the memories.
