During the rise of the internet in the late 1990s, many products came and went which tried to bring the internet to the average household without requiring an expensive computer. One such product, initially announced in July 1996 and then released in September that same year, was called WebTV. The way it worked was that you'd purchase a set-top box from a contemporary electronics store like Best Buy or Circuit City, hook it into your home phone line and television, and then sign up for a monthly subscription that would run you $19.99 per month. The set-top box would act as a thin client giving you access to the internet which included newsgroup conversations and a dedicated webtv.net email address.
An example of a WebTV box, you can almost smell the 90s emanating from it
WebTV was fairly successful for its time and was acquired by Microsoft in April 1997. Of course, like anything popular that is tech-related, a hacking community soon sprang up and what followed was a wild west where people were trying to do practically anything they could with their boxes (both innocently and maliciously) by trying to access more inner parts of them, the service, and even
other people's accounts using WebTV-specific URLs, XSS exploits, Flash exploits, and an ungodly amount of cheesing through bad security practices using a combination of the aforementioned exploits. Typical of the 1990s,
many such skirmishes were recorded onto actual VHS tapes, making them time capsules of the early web. With time, the hacking community slowly moved on from the service and eventually the service itself shut down in September 2013 after rebranding as MSN TV in 2001 and several new models coming out including ones with DVR functionality in the early to mid 2000s.
This is what many people saw in mid to late 2013 when they went onto the WebTV website.
In 1998, a WebTV user named MattMan69 (yes, that's his actual screen name, what a legend) created a website to document his adventures in dicking around with the service and leak new features that were being beta-tested under NDA by acting as a proxy for those who were in the program. He was at it for years and at some point even had his service terminated by WebTV for it. He continued to update it up until around 2005 when he officially announced he was leaving the scene, only to begin updating it again briefly in September 2013 following the service's closure as he re-entered the scene to partially resurrect the now-useless boxes to make them do new stuff again and archive his stockpile of old shit he had lying around. He then got involved with in other WebTV-related projects (including private servers to get the boxes back on the internet) starting in around September 2019 and has continued to do so since then.
His website, although definitely dated and ancient by today's standards, is still up and is semi-regularly getting updated to this very day.
Unlike my previous entries in this thread, this website was actually found organically. I don't remember exactly how I found it, but I discovered it in May 2016 whilst I was binge-watching obscure YouTube videos about old hardware that nobody remembers when I came across an episode about WebTV. Even though I was a retarded 12/13 year old with an excessively inflated ego who was too busy trying to act like the biggest savage hurling middle school level insults at my colleagues, I found WebTV and its hacking community intriguing and kept tabs on both the website and the overall community for years. During the peak of my fascination (and borderline obsession) with VHS footage and anything archived using it in late 2019, I actually emailed MattMan himself and asked if he had any other VHS recordings of WebTV and following a brief back and forth, he ended up finding a tape that had surviving footage of him dicking around on WebTV and uploaded it to YouTube. Pretty cool stuff!
