--- Curt Vendel <curt(a)atari-history.com> wrote: Wish I did. We _had_ QUBE when it was new. Big Fun. For those that don't know, it was an unassuming cable box, black, maybe 30cm x 30cm x 5cm, but the interesting part was this pod on the end of a 10m cable - it had 10 buttons down the left side, three across the bottom, and 5 on the right. The three at the bottom were momentary - they selected a filter bank in the box to give you a range of 10 channels (of which only one at a time could be depressed; it would pop up the previous selection). The columns were marked P, C and T for "Premium", "Community" and "Television". Among other things, I recall that P7 or P8 was for R-rated entertainment, and P10 was for Adult. The five buttons on the right, and the "Response" light at the top were the interactive part - with interactive programming of local origin (they had a full-blown TV studio as well as a cable franchise), the host could initiate a poll - the Response light meant that the voting period was open - or simply tell you to press "1" to have information about the current show/guest mailed to you with your bill. There was even a kids game show with Flippo the Clown that you could play along with at home. It was plagued with technical problems galore - the first month, they gave away the movies (there were only two pay movies, "A Star is Born", and "Raggedy Ann and Andy") because their billing system was messed up. Another game was to figure out how to defeat the box and watch free movies - they went through 5 generations or so before it got too hard for ordinary consumers to bother. The first one was the easiest - press down three or more black response buttons and change the column from C or T to P. The light would indicate the old column, but the filter bank would change internally, displaying the P channels. You could swap from 1 to 10 at will. The system never noticed you were in the premium rank. It got harder after that. I kinda miss it. We used to have great fun with the kids show, and it was good for cooking shows, too. It expanded to several cities in Ohio and Texas before Warner folded it. This was all well over 10 years ago, so the technology is quite on topic. -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com

Ethan Wow, thanks for the all the great info.....

Uh, I have at least one classic cable TV converter in my collection. Anyone remember ONTV from southern California?