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.