I Remember Web: WebTV

 This was a series I was trying to start up something back when I was trying to post on Reddit more often.  As the political censorship ramped up during the 2016 election I was actively trying to maintain an account for my actual personal writings there.  I was posting to writing prompts by grabbing a few prompts here and there and seeing if I could doodle a few words into a short story.  Naturally that meant an account not linked to my main.  I'm not sure if I should have bothered.  At some point or another the small subreddit I was working on got deleted and at some point or another that account shadowbanned.  I never bothered to reinstate it.

 This series was called 'I remember Web' and was based in part on the articles I remembered reading from a magazine my Grandmother used to subscribe to, called Reminisce Magazine.  The articles were all made up of reader submissions and told of times past and ended always with the words: I remember, I was there.  This was my attempt to create something like it for the earlier days of the web, hence the name.

Some time later I discovered that a few of those old prompts had been saved to my email from when I originally worked on them.  I plan to share those here....

 

I Remember Web: WebTV

Believe it or not at one point it made sense to buy a small computer with very limited memory and storage which worked entirely by keyboard commands and connect this to your television and use it to browse the Web and do email. These were not really intended for you or me who grew up with desktops, laptops, and smartphones and tablets---these were intended for your sainted Aunt Tildie. With a WebTV your Aunt Tildie could (and did) spam your email box with an endless chain of emails featuring every subject under the sun. From celebrities having words stuffed in their mouth to make political points they never ever would have said in real life, to scams of all types from far-off princes in Nigeria who just needed a little help from **you** to the ever popular Bill Gates will give you money for forwarding this email---Aunt Tildie passed them all along to *you*! Don't you feel the love?

Eventually the company was bought out by Microsoft and in the next version of Windows they branded their optional installation of a television application as 'WebTV' but unfortunately for Microsoft they did not think to add the ability to do email or browse the web by keyboard to this app which was truly 'WebTV for Windows' in name only. I suppose it's difficult to really blame them, in 1998 very few people were plugging their computer desktops into their television sets and at that time it required either a special TV with an svideo port and a special video card with that same output or a video card that supported RCA video. These were expensive and in truth adding too much to the WebTV for Windows application would have conflicted with other efforts, such as the original Xbox and what later became known as Windows Media Center.

Microsoft would eventually go on to refresh and rebrand WebTV as MSN-tv and provide a beefier box with expanded memory, storage, and the ability to play flash video. This limped along until one day Microsoft end of life'd the system fully expecting people to move on to other options. Some of the older people in my life have--my Dad enjoys the use of his iPad and smartphone. I don't get that many emails from Aunt Tildie these days though since her WebTV broke and she was unable to replace it. Oddly enough I miss those spam emails she used to send me...

I remember web... I remember WebTV (MSN-tv).