[HN Gopher] Apple's interactive television box: Hacking the set ...
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Apple's interactive television box: Hacking the set top box System
7.1 in ROM
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 200 points
Date : 2023-07-22 05:30 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
| IntelMiner wrote:
| That was an Alice in Wonderland level of rabbit hole to fall down
| and a fantastic read about a device I never knew existed!
|
| I wonder if something like Linux or NetBSD could be burned on to
| the ROM card to get the system into a more 'friendly' state for
| debugging the broken SCSI adapter the author mentioned
| onurcel wrote:
| I hope the magic of HN will bring one of the men in the photo to
| intervene here.
| classichasclass wrote:
| (author) I had a feeling HN would know who these people were.
| Anyone know which one was "Fred" (as in FredTVApp)?
|
| (edit: looks like Fred Huxham per comment below)
| CharlesW wrote:
| The top row is Sean Allen, Jim Batson, and Mike Dodd. Center
| square is Peter Hoddie.
|
| (Fun fact: Sean is why QuickTime Movie root atom container
| headers have a type value of `sean`.)
| classichasclass wrote:
| That explains the Sean joke I found elsewhere!
| mackid wrote:
| The person in the center is Peter Hoddie.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Came to say the same. Peter was a Quicktime engineer.
|
| A coworker and I came across a stack of these machines in an
| abandoned lab at Apple's Infinite Loop Campus decades ago. We
| didn't know what they were although we were sure they were
| some kind of set-top box that Apple had abandoned. I feel
| like my coworker knew the code name but if he did, it escapes
| me now.
|
| A young Bruce Leak (top left)?
|
| A young Jim Batson (top center)?
| ericlewis wrote:
| Left center I think is Fred Huxham.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| sen wrote:
| This is so cool, there's nothing I love to read about more than
| someone spending insane amounts of time hacking some old piece of
| hardware that even when done will be completely useless in the
| modern era, for no other reason than "why not?".
| rcarmo wrote:
| This was an amazing read. As someone who spent a long time
| hacking 68k Macs, I laughed out loud when I came to "Moving or
| substantially altering this code in ResEdit has side effects,
| usually explosive ones".
| duskwuff wrote:
| The cause of those "explosive" side effects is relocations. The
| JSRs aren't actually jumping to low memory (e.g. 0x000007DE);
| they're relative to the base of the CODE resource, and get
| fixed up at load time based on a list of offsets stored
| elsewhere. Move one of the JSR instructions, and suddenly the
| relocation gets applied to the wrong place.
| msh wrote:
| Were they really thinking that the phone companies would install
| T1 lines in everyone's house?
| xp84 wrote:
| I'm more shocked at the notion of the T1, HDSL or whatever
| being run all the way to this STB. Imagine 1.5Mbps of bandwidth
| straight to your house and only being able to use it with this
| one limited device!
|
| But of course, the Web and lots of other goodies normal people
| might want to do online were not even close to mature yet. So
| this could plausibly be your only network-connected device.
| Wild.
| wmf wrote:
| Yes, the interactive TV stuff in the 1990s was kind of a bet
| against the Internet. It's amazing to me that multiple
| companies developed entire systems that were 10x-100x too
| expensive to bring to market; I guess they hadn't heard that
| too early is the same as wrong.
| classichasclass wrote:
| (author) I had a residential T1 line for many years, and a
| friend of mine had one even earlier when most of us were still
| on dialup. It was certainly as possible as anything else was at
| the time.
| bombcar wrote:
| I knew a few who got a T1 line "installed to (their) house" as
| the song goes. There was a quite spicy time very early on where
| many things seemed potentially reasonable (ISDN, T1, etc)
| before DSL and DOCSIS took over everything.
| wmf wrote:
| Wasn't a T1 around $1,500 per month in 1995? Imagine using
| such expensive service to deliver... TV.
| bombcar wrote:
| The one I knew the price of was about $450 a month (maybe
| in 98?) but that was because there was some local
| completion and ISPs as such already existed vs ISPs using
| the local telco monopoly.
| grishka wrote:
| It's interesting to see how differently it all worked out in
| the US. I've never seen or heard about T1, I personally went
| from dial-up straight to Ethernet. Some people used to use
| ADSL. DOCSIS is also still a thing, but it's being replaced
| with better technologies (the slow uplink is meh).
| bombcar wrote:
| For awhile "poor man's ISDN" was a thing with some local
| ISPs - you'd get something on your end that could shotgun
| multiple 56k modems, and they'd be able to bond them
| together.
| retrac wrote:
| Not in a literal sense. The article mentions T1 probably not
| because literally expecting literal T-1 service on coax, but
| because T-1 used to be used as a metric of bandwidth. It's 24
| standard voice circuits (12 and 24 being traditional groupings
| for voice circuits). It's approximately 1.5 mbit/s.
|
| This is about the minimum bandwidth required to make standard
| definition MPEG-1 video work. That was by design -- it was the
| bandwidth of a 1x CD-ROM drive or a T1 line.
|
| The phone companies eventually _did_ provision that much
| bandwidth to each home. And not that much long after. DSL at 1
| mbit /s was around by 1997.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The port on the back of the Apple STB is actually literally a
| T1/E1 port (even though it looks like TP Ethernet), with a
| Brooktree Bt8069-Series Line Interface Unit chip inside for a
| T1/E1 interface!
|
| I'm not sure if there were T1 adapters for DSL etc back in
| the day, but I guess that's plausible (before the computer
| world won over the telecom world there were a lot of weird
| standards that looked like they would be adopted - ATM
| anyone?)
|
| edit: Apparently T1 started being carried over HDSL which is
| probably what was being used here
| https://www.arcelect.com/HDSL3698.htm
| fredoralive wrote:
| In case anyone is interested, this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVwrsnaWGDw is a promotional
| video for BT's 1995 trial of the boxes in the UK. More flashy
| promo that deep look at the UI though. The ability to download
| SNES games to a flash cart (~4:50) is perhaps one of the more
| intriguing bit of the service.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Apple's early world dictator dreams -- expecting applause?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I liked _that_ era Apple. Engineers called the shots, made
| things _they_ would want.
| nidnogg wrote:
| That picture with the developers just made it for me. Great read.
| The floodgap website read like quite the treasure trove as well,
| with the neatest showcase [1] of the author's collection.
|
| Thanks for bringing it up!
|
| [1] https://www.floodgap.com/etc/machines.html
| janandonly wrote:
| Before reading this, I didn't even know Apple had ever made a
| setop box before the more recent Apple TV.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| The original Apple TV ran a modified OS X 10.4. Have one in my
| basement. :)
| dagmx wrote:
| And to a degree, the latest one runs a modified iOS which is
| a modified macOS if you go back far enough.
| mattl wrote:
| Everything they make runs OPENSTEP, basically.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Not quite the same, but there was also the Macintosh TV [1] -
| an all-in-one desktop Mac with a TV tuner - and the Pippin
| console [2].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_TV
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin
| mikeryan wrote:
| Just because this is my wheelhouse and I've been in it a long
| time I'm going to get pedantic.
|
| An STB and OTT box are different - different video delivery
| mechanisms of IP vs. QAM.
|
| This line got blurred however in the early to mid 2000s with IP
| based services.
|
| The hard part of getting a box deployed outside of the Motorola
| and Scientific Atlantic boxes that ruled the early days of
| cable was a lack of standards of back office systems. So you
| couldn't just build a box you had to have a whole stack for
| device provisioning etc.
|
| I worked for a company Comcast bought in the early 2000s when
| they were buying up smaller regional systems and it was a mess
| trying to get everything aligned. It probably took 15 to 20
| years until they finally ironed it all out. To be fair to
| Comcast they did a good enough job that they now license their
| X1 platform to other operators (Cox, Shaw, Quebecor)
| vondur wrote:
| Shout out to the Quadra 605, my first Mac. Such a cool computer
| back in the day and relatively affordable at the time. Used it
| for many years later as a monitor stand too.
| cstross wrote:
| >it's somewhat surprising that only one Mac officially could boot
| the Mac OS entirely from ROM, namely the Macintosh Classic (hold
| down Cmd-Option-X-O to boot from a hidden HFS volume with System
| 6.0.3).
|
| This is not actually true: one other Mac could do this -- the
| Powerbook 100 could boot into System 6.0.8 (going by memory: I
| owned one).
|
| The PB100 was the entry-level model of the original Powerbook
| launch range, and differed from the other Powerbooks, the 140 and
| 170. The latter were 68030 machines, but the PB100 ran on a 68000
| and was designed by Sony -- it was physically smaller and lighter
| than the other two but used a weird lead acid battery that could
| run it for something like 40-50 minutes. Not sure _why_ it booted
| MacOS 6 from ROM, but I suspect it might originally have been
| designed as a floppy-only machine to save battery power relative
| to the hard disk model they shipped.
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(page generated 2023-07-22 23:02 UTC)