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Apple Interactive Television Box (cancelled prototype web-TV thing)

X

xjas

Experienced Member
Joined
Jul 9, 2015
Messages
396
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Vancouver Island
Just listed this on Ebay. Wasn't sure what to ask, but it needs a new home, so low starting bid.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/133073167760

On the one hand, RARE UNRELEASED APPLE PROTOTYPE ST3VE JERBS L@@K
On the other hand, early-'90s WebTV. :p

These don't do much as-is since the servers are long gone... If you search around by M-number there are a few forum threads where people have dug into them & gotten some results. Apparently they'll boot System 7 off an external SCSI disk, but getting video out is nontrivial. I guess you could also swap in a standard Mac or whatever motherboard and have an interesting pizza box PC. Otherwise it's a cool collectors piece for someone. :)
 
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^^ I'd prefer to let the auction run its course, but feel free to shoot me a PM. If it doesn't sell on there I'll give you first dibs before I re-list. :)
 
It's not a "Web-TV" thing (ie web browser) or a PVR, it is a set top box using T1/E1 comms instead of cable.
The internal code name was "STB" and went through several generations.
Main customer was British Telecom.
It is designed to work with a T1/E1 communications interface to stream video.
 
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Al, maybe you know. I have an AITB with the developer (?) video card. Or what I think is a video card, since it has a DA-15 on it, but I never got a signal out of it. Do you know anything about it? It works fine otherwise.
 
ClassicHasClass said:
Al, maybe you know. I have an AITB with the developer (?) video card. Or what I think is a video card, since it has a DA-15 on it, but I never got a signal out of it. Do you know anything about it? It works fine otherwise.
Click to expand...

I found a post someone made in another forum about how that card is a video card used by developers. Of course the unit will probably still want to netboot with an image that has the software needed to make that work. I'm on the hunt for one of those cards myself but they're probably more rare than the set top box itself.
 
I don't recall either of them having the red SIMM. I think I used a regular LC475 SIMM in the working unit, but again, I'll have to locate it first. I think I moved it out to the climate control unit until I could figure out something else to do with it.
 
ClassicHasClass said:
I don't recall either of them having the red SIMM. I think I used a regular LC475 SIMM in the working unit, but again, I'll have to locate it first. I think I moved it out to the climate control unit until I could figure out something else to do with it.
Click to expand...

This unit has a green SIMM and I think is more or less the final STB ROM they were going to use in these. Someone on 68kmla has a red ROM with "STB 7.0" and it actually activates the display to print "Apple" across the screen, whereas this one doesn't. This one is booting off attached SCSI drives though and I booted it from my LC 475's drive:

stbscreenshot.jpg

As per all the other related threads, the Mac OS doesn't work with the video outputs so I have to boot it blind. I'm currently trying to see if I can figure out how to make that happen, but I would also like to obtain a raw dump of the red ROM that brings up video.
 
^^ pretty cool you got it to boot! I always meant to try but never had the right combo of working System 7 machine + working SCSI HDD at the same time. How'd you get the screenshot?
 
xjas said:
^^ pretty cool you got it to boot! I always meant to try but never had the right combo of working System 7 machine + working SCSI HDD at the same time. How'd you get the screenshot?
Click to expand...

The insides are heavily based on an LC 475 and I happen to have one of those I use often so I've got a scsi2sd drive with system 7.5.5 on it. Just for fun I put it into an external case and connected it to the scsi port and turned the unit on, and the HD activity light went nuts while it started to boot immediately. I actually didn't expect that to happen with the particular ROM in the unit, but after the boot process seemed to end I hit command+shift+3 on an attached keyboard and it took a screenshot. I still have no way to actually see what's happening on the screen, but if I'm lucky enough I can blindly move the mouse and open things like the About box in this other screenshot:

stbscreenshot2.jpg

I was also able to make a dump of the ROM this way so I might toy with trying to disassemble it. Got a bunch of other ideas to work on so we'll see how it goes.
 
Okay, so I haven't found it yet (didn't get a chance to hit the unit this weekend), but I did find my old pictures from when I had it out last.

Al, here is the machine with the top off. I'll take a better picture of the card when I find it, but this gives you an idea. The video card is installed in the unit's single PDS(?) slot.

https://www.floodgap.com/iv/2460

Here is it starting up on LocalTalk. Guess which one it is.

https://www.floodgap.com/iv/2465

Here is System Profiler with the AITB running and an LC475 SIMM.

https://www.floodgap.com/iv/2468

I'd forgotten about this, but I actually do have (I think) the red SIMM. But I don't remember it acting any differently. It has an interesting notation on it, does this match yours, netfreak?

https://www.floodgap.com/iv/2681
 
ClassicHasClass said:
Okay, so I haven't found it yet (didn't get a chance to hit the unit this weekend), but I did find my old pictures from when I had it out last.

Al, here is the machine with the top off. I'll take a better picture of the card when I find it, but this gives you an idea. The video card is installed in the unit's single PDS(?) slot.

https://www.floodgap.com/iv/2460

Here is it starting up on LocalTalk. Guess which one it is.

https://www.floodgap.com/iv/2465

Here is System Profiler with the AITB running and an LC475 SIMM.

https://www.floodgap.com/iv/2468

I'd forgotten about this, but I actually do have (I think) the red SIMM. But I don't remember it acting any differently. It has an interesting notation on it, does this match yours, netfreak?

https://www.floodgap.com/iv/2681
Click to expand...

I've got some close up pictures of the video card from another source but there seems to be very little information actually floating around. Supposedly it was made by "MicroConversions" who also did a few other Mac cards like Voodoo1/2 or something. I'm assuming any software driver is lost to time.

The ROM in this unit is the green mask ROM so probably close to the final consumer product. I used a ROM dumper in the startup folder and it produced a 1MB file I'm in the process of figuring out how to disassemble. One thing that interests me is someone with a red ROM with "STB3 7.0" on it can get video to output from the unit upon powerup as seen in https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Apple_Interactive_Television_Box#Getting_TV_Output so I'd be very curious to find the differences between these ROMs.
 
netfreak said:
I've got some close up pictures of the video card from another source but there seems to be very little information actually floating around. Supposedly it was made by "MicroConversions" who also did a few other Mac cards like Voodoo1/2 or something. I'm assuming any software driver is lost to time.
Click to expand...

I see a socketed config rom, so that shouldn't be an issue. Basic Mac video functionality doesn't need a driver, since it has to work before the system is read from disk.
 
Al Kossow said:
I see a socketed config rom, so that shouldn't be an issue. Basic Mac video functionality doesn't need a driver, since it has to work before the system is read from disk.
Click to expand...

I wonder if this was something shoved into one of those older developer ROMs.
 
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