WebTV Enthusiasts: Keeping Vintage Tech Alive in 2022

There’s a guy on YouTube browsing the modern web on a CRT television using a WebTV set-top box from 1997. The page loads are glacial. The rendering is hilariously wrong—CSS3 was not designed for a device with 560 pixels of horizontal resolution. And yet I watched the entire 40-minute video with a stupid grin on my face.

I shouldn’t be surprised. I spent my early career working with the constraints of early web technology. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching people refuse to let old hardware die.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the Ethics of Web Ownership

There’s an irony in Tim Berners-Lee’s position that I can’t stop thinking about. He invented the World Wide Web as an open, decentralized system for sharing information. Thirty-two years later, he’s building tools to reclaim it from the companies that centralized it.

The web was supposed to be ours. Berners-Lee designed it that way — open protocols, no gatekeepers, anyone can publish, anyone can read. In the early years, that’s roughly how it worked. Personal websites, independent forums, distributed communities linked together by hypertext.