PlayCable research and development

[+Lathe26]

Epic research, Decle!  I love reading the new material.  It's fascinating.

[Walter Ives]

On 9/19/2023 at 6:09 PM, decle said:

The latest update of the PlayCable research document can be downloaded here:

Just so you know, GI/Jerrold's desire to disseminate software over cable did not end with PlayCable. By the time of PlayCable's cancellation, the underlying technology was pretty much obsolete anyway. But Jerrold was a major supplier of set-top cable boxes and had to defend its leadership position against possible usurpers, so it couldn't ignore the possibilities. The perceived danger was that some competitor would come up with a viable service and that cable companies would begin switching to their set-top boxes en masse, killing off their business overnight. To guard against that, Don Butler was tasked with creating a follow-up game-capable set-top box. The resulting design built upon the Intellivision/PlayCable experience and supported higher resolution backgrounds than the Intellivision could produce and larger, multi-colored objects. It also supported upstream communication and video on demand.

WJI