What it really did for most users was serve as a catalog of software that you could load and run, at speeds that were not inconsistent with floppy drives of the era. So, if you wanted to play Zork I or Miner 2049er, you could do it without "buying" the game -- you were paying a monthly fee for access to a library of software. IIRC, it was a Z80 under the hood, probably running some flavor of CP/M.
As a concept, it wasn't a bad one. In practice, the BBS and piracy scenes of both the Apple ][ and C-64 communities made "a shared library of software" less of an exclusive commodity than Nabu's backers planned for.
I was on the waitlist for 2 years, and finally got it. Gotta love new tech at the time.
Anyone remember Sega Channel? I was the only kid I knew that had it and very few people have even heard of it. It was so unreliable.
It's on my huge list of "things my parents acted like were super expensive but now that I'm a working adult know it wasn't" list.
Apparently it was a big part of improving cable signaling.
> The SEGA Channel delivered games to over 250,000 subscribers over regular coaxial cable. Games would download to the Genesis’ volatile RAM, meaning that they were erased from the system’s memory each time the console was powered off. No matter, though – games could be downloaded again in under a minute. It’s little wonder the service won Popular Science’s “Best of What’s New” award in 1994. The service continued until July 31, 1998, well into the next generation of consoles. Many cable operators had to clean their broadcast signal and equipment to ensure the SEGA Channel could be received, so the very fact that you’re enjoying broadband internet right now could well be thanks to SEGA.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/20/sega-a-soothsayer-of...
My aunt swears that WPS on the DEC Rainbow was the only word processor able to correctly do footnotes and only grudgingly switched to MS-Word in the 90s. I wish I had intercepted that machine on the way to the dump. And the Alpha went in the trash too... Oh well.
Programs were small enough that people were typing in hex codes published in magazines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-in_program).
I know today we can easily utilize 6Mbps but relatively speaking this feels like it'd be the equivalent to something like 1 Tbps today. I don't know what the home pc user would be doing with it.
I mean you had BBS' but what else. Did this even do TCPIP? Windows didn't get a TCPIP stack till 3.11 right?
https://gizmodo.com/why-2-000-nabu-pcs-appeared-on-ebay-1850...
Here demonstrating early prototypes a full year before HackRF Kickstarter, including ridiculously cook huge spectrum analyzer [HackRF update with Jared Boone, Hak5 1417.1 - Hack Across America 2013] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l42mZ7BDB9A
How someone designed this product and figured out where all the resistors, oscillators, crystals and flip-flop chips and other pointy out things go where and were while ensuring it's tuning to 15.something mhz is beyond me.
Very cool though, I really envy knowledge of such.
