TV internet precursor

[WOHO]

yes, worried about cable listening to your house. NOAA Weather Radio was stand-alone because people were suspicious of having your TV automatically turned-on for a tornado warning, so maybe they could 'listen to you too'. Now we have these damn hockey pucks that DO LISTEN to us 24/7/365, and you can be some agency IS listening to every boring item going thru the microphone on your Alexa!

[organman95]

A little trivia:

In some of the early cable franchise agreements (Detroit City in particular) there was a requirement that the cable operator had to provide, upon request of the subscriber, an "A/B switch" or similar disconnect device between the cable and the set top box or the cable and the television so that the subscriber could be protected from the cable company in the event that the cable company used the television or set top box to pick up audio or video from inside the house.

Well that is certainly interesting. Didn't think that was technologically possible back then.

[SolarMax]

Well that is certainly interesting. Didn't think that was technologically possible back then.

Some of this could be done by dialup, simply using a subscriber's telephone line (back when everybody had landline). Possible there may have been some cable equipment capable of returning phone-grade audio back to the head end.

[km1125]

In the early 80's some cable systems were definitely two-way capable, although not to every house. Most of it was used for internal purposes, such as backhauling all the phone lines from one office to another (Oak Park back to Southfield in one example) and monitoring of the signals on the cable equipment. There were some that did extend into the homes for home security systems.

As mentioned, you could also do this with the home phone line, as that was also how some Pay Per View systems worked.

Most of the franchise agreements were also written based on all the pitches they were given, which included a lot of promises of two-way interactive services

[mmb5]

In the early 90s I had a service called X*Press. You split your cable feed into the X*Press box, and the output was IIRC a connection into the old-style printer port. Through that you essentially had an AP wire with continuous sports and stock updates.

[BFSEsq]

How quaint... the portable aspect was not yet on the radar and I assume he imagined large consoles... very interesting..

I think that's what a lot of the predictions were at the time. People as a whole aren't really that great at predicting the future just because we can't break our minds out of the paradigm we're in. We tended to envision the interactivity that's now part of the internet as being baked into TVs because that just seemed to make sense at the time. What's the center of the home, the thing we all naturally gather around? The TV, right? I guess not anymore. (You could argue that it is, but the internet being available on any number of devices still has a way of superseding it.) I used to imagine that we'd all eventually have keyboards connected to our TV sets somehow, maybe wirelessly, and that we'd go on web browsers on our TVs. Which, yes, they tried for a while and it wasn't exactly a H*** hit. Once computers became more of a standard device, everything just migrated there (at first.)