wincy|15mon ago

I convinced my very broke single mom to get a webtv when I was 10 or so. We didn’t have a PC. It was magical, and pushed that thing as far as I could with playing weird browser based multiplayer games and chat rooms and all sorts of stuff. It was my first Internet connected device and how I got my start with tech despite being from a pretty poor family.

So for the developers who worked at WebTV, thanks from one (now) developer to another. I might not have become who I am today without it!

awhitty|15mon ago

An extremely tangential personal anecdote -

I learned about WebTV while writing essays for my college applications more than ten years ago. I had stumbled on this memorial site[0] for an engineer at WebTV named Jos who passed well before his time. The site includes some of his college essays[1] as well as some other bits of writing like his guide to OOP programming[2] (complete with Spanish and Portuguese translations !). His writing style and sense of humor have stuck with me for years and years now, and I still visit the site to have a laugh. Seemed like a very dynamic individual, and I'm grateful to his family for keeping his memory alive.

[0]: https://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/

[1]: https://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/college/index...

[2]: https://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/oop/index.htm...