Qube (warner Amex)

On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 05:44:52PM -0500, CBurroughs(a)aol.com wrote: The old QUBE system is no more (at least not in Columbus, OH, where it started). My family had it from day zero (including all the billing bugs that were so bad that for the first month, all the movies were free). I know *nothing* about how cable boxes work. I presume they are a mass of switched filter elements, but beyond that, I think most of the magic of Qube happened at the other end. Perhaps it doesn't see the right signal from the central cable office? Perhaps you have one of the later units that has a tamper switch? What does your "pendant" look like? Is it the oldest one that's mostly roundish with a cylindrical magnetic "key" at the top? Is it newer with a wafer key at the cable box? The very oldest boxes could be coaxed to give up free movies by pressing all five "response" buttons, then switching the column from either "C" or "T" to "P". The corresponding LED would not change, but the channel would. You could then select P1 to P10 with the row buttons, and the system would not notice. The next generation box could be tricked by holding a speaker magnet underneath and switching columns. After that, you had to pry open the pendant and stick a paper clip in the correct rivet hole in the response button switch bank (I forget which one). Finally, they modified the box to send back billing pulses when a premium channel was being displayed (but you could build an analog filter to block it). The last incarnation would cut you off if it was sending out premium content and did not get any billing pulses in a 15 minute interval (you had to call them up on the phone to turn your service back on). That was pretty much the end of free pay-per-view Qube. All this information is, um, anecdotal, naturally. :-) -ethan P.S. - years after we cancelled Qube for repeated billing screwups, I ended up working with one of the office managers and one of the Qube billing programmers at Software Results. Heard some interesting stories about why things were so screwed up in the early days, but they translate to overeager executives and unrealistic deadlines made worse by decreasing funding (interactive cable implies locally produced programming which became too expensive to produce year after year). -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 20-Jan-2004 16:20 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -7.9 F (-22.2 C) Windchill -29.9 F (-34.4 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 8.30 kts Grid 346 Barometer 688.5 mb (10305. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html