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 one of those newfangled personal computers when they already had a perfect good television set. This opened a market for TV-connected thin clients that could browse the web with a much lower entry fee, with the WebTV service being launched in 1996. Bought by Microsoft in 1997 and renamed MSN TV, it lasted until 2013. Yet rather than this being the end, the service is now being revived by members of the community through the WebTV Redialed project.
The project, which was recently featured in a video by [MattKC], replaces the original back-end services that the thin clients connected to via their dial-up modems, with the first revision using a proprietary protocol. The later and much more powerful MSN TV 2 devices relied on a standard HTTP-based protocol running on Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) web server and Windows.
What’s interesting about this new project is that it allows you to not just reconnect your vintage WebTV/MSN TV box, but also use a Windows-based viewer and more. What difficulty level you pick depends on the chosen hardware and connection method. For example, you can pair the Raspberry Pi with a USB modem to get online thanks to the DeamPi project.
Interestingly, DreamPi was created to get the Sega Dreamcast back online, with said console also having its own WebTV port that can be revived this way. Just in case you really want to get the full Dreamcast experience.
The Wii also had a web browser back in the day
“back in the day”
OMG how that sounds! 😆 The Wii isn’t that old by now! It’s rather modern!?
It’s merely, well, uh, um, slightly less than 20 years old? 🫣
The Wii launched in November/December 2006 or so.
The same year when Windows 9x went EOL, which just had happened recently.
May 2014 was apparently the shutdown date for many Wii services,
but the final shutdown was last year in April 2024. Or so it seems.
https://cyberpost.co/when-did-wii-internet-end/
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/63227/~/announcement-of-discontinuation-of-online-services-for-nintendo-3ds-and-wii-u
Yeah I was already into my first job when the Wii launched and when writing the comment I said “oh yeah the Wii had that too,” then thought “oh yeah that was actually quite a while ago.
Us old folks ha.
While they´re at it they should also bring back AOL, to get the worst of the past browsers.
For chatting, there’s already NINA/Escargot in principle.
https://msfn.org/board/topic/184953-nina-aol-desktop-and-aim-revival/
Also, AOL, CompuServe, Genie, Prodigy, Delphi and the like used to be online services (rather than ISPs).
They had their own networks and protocols, separate from the internet/www.
I probably tell the obvious here, but I made the experience that modern day people often call everything online “the internet”.
Eventhough the internet/web wasn’t open to public until the 90s.
Everything prior the 90s were mailboxes (BBSes), databases, on-line services etc.
Again, I do probably stating the obvious here. Never mind. 🙂
The story is a bit different than the “Redialed” team portrays.
Any respectable journalist would reach out to “MattMan”, “eMac”, or even me.
Any journalist just looking for a click would believe the lies of the Redialed team.
YouTubers are not respectable journalists :)
All that to say nothing. Could have used the opportunity to detail what was wrong, and why, but NOPE.
WebTV? Was that the thing that brought a lot of CAPS loud weirdos to Usenet? From memory they were at least easy to filter…