🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <41af0o$lus@sundog.tiac.net>,
Jim Williams  <williams@tiac.net> wrote:
>igords@odyssee.net (Igor David Schneider) wrote:
>>
>>Think about what you're saying, if MSwanted to do that would they put
>>in the registration Wizard at all. Not likely, they'd just do it in
>>stealth when you connect to MSN. 
>>
>
>Which, as I understand it, they basically did do at first. (Admitted
>hearsay.)
>
>I think I saw somewhere that early versions of Win95 betas
>did not ask if it was ok to upload your directory structure.


Just to add a little more fuel back onto this fire :-)
I thought I'd post an aritcle that was posted to rec.video.satellite.dbs
about MSN.  The juicy part is near the end:


--------------------------

From hayden@teleport.com Mon Aug 21 11:40:53 PDT 1995
Newsgroups: rec.video.satellite.dbs
Subject: Re: Internet on DSS
Message-ID: <hayden.3.000AF385@teleport.com>

In article <mtriley-0808951207020001@rileym.educ.csus.edu> mtriley@skynet2.csus.edu (Mark Riley) writes:
>From: mtriley@skynet2.csus.edu (Mark Riley)
>Subject: Internet on DSS
>Date: Tue, 08 Aug 1995 12:07:02 -0800

>I have heard that DSS will someday have Internet access on it.  This
>sounds like it could be done easily due to the fact that it has a modem
>internally.  I would like to know if anyone has more information on this.

>Nathaniel Riley
>Internet/Channel Surfer
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Perhaps the following article from EE Times will confuse the issue further.

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>From  Electronic Engineering Times, August 14th, 1995, page 79:

Mediastream by Richard Doherty

"I want my PC TV"

Until late last month, it was one of the multimedia-PC industry's most closely 
held secrets. Non-disclosure documents the size of phone books were issued to 
keep it under wraps. And then . . . well, Microsoft suddenly felt like 
revealing it to a huge developer audience as a prime example of why the 
Microsoft Network (MSN) will be soooo compelling. The result: the premiere of 
PC TV.

PC TV is a plug-in PC peripheral version of the satellite-decoder box for 
theHughes DirecTV Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) TV system. RCA-Thomson and 
Sony Electronics have manufactured more than 1.25 million of the standalone 
decoder-box systems for DirecTv in the past 13 months. About two-thirds of 
those are installed, providing users with 175 channels of MPEG-delivered 
digital-video entertainment.

Hughes launched its third DBS satellite on June 9. Colocated with the first 
two satellites, the latest is not destined to deliver another 90 channels of 
digital TV. Rather, its true destiny lies in transmitting digital data: news, 
software and auxiliary entertainment content. The resulting delivery of data 
to decoder boxes via satellite will be the digital equivalent of Niagra Falls.

But DirecTv is just part of the picture. Later this year, PC TV will deliver 
megabits of DBS data each second to home PCs. In Long Beach, Calif., Microsoft 
demonstratedjust how effective PC TV will be as the raison d'etre for MSN.

The demo at Microsoft's sell-out Interactive Multimedia Conference was 
staggering. Yes, the PC TV system brings MPEG-1.8 entertainment and 
information services to the PC screen and stereo speakers, orto an adjacent TV 
set. But its prime purpose is feeding slurps and globs of digital data -- in 
the form of multimedia, MPEG-1 video, digital audio, documents and 
applications -- directly into the host PC.

Most of the data traffic is envisaged as broadcast data, i.e., every pertinent 
news story can be telecast every few seconds. Imagine what you could do with a 
21-Mbit/second data delivery stream that can reach all or part of your 
customer audience every few seconds from Miami to Maine? The demo that blew 
away nearly every one of the 3,000 attendees involved a simulcast of a "Batman 
Forever" MSN show held concurrently with the Pay-Per-View window of the Warner 
movie. A video jockey (VJ) holds MSN PC TV viewers' attention while pointing 
out that a Fanzine has just been downloaded to the user's hard disk. (By the 
way, the user's system configuration and user statistics have similarly been 
sent back to MSN over an internal high-speed modem.)

Then the VJ says: "Now, just hold your Timex/Microsoft DataLink watch up to 
the screen for a big surprise!" The PC TV viewer's reward: a $1 coupon for 
your next meal at McDonalds was downloaded into the watch's CMOS memory and 
display! No paper. No printers. It was loaded directly into the DataLink 
watch's memory.

The audience audibly gasped. You will too when PC TV arrives bundled with 
certain multimedia PCs this fall, or offered as a standalone peripheral for 
existing systems.

------

Richard Doherty is director of The Envisioneering Group, an engineering 
testing and market research counseling organization based in Seaford, N.Y. He 
can be linked at rdoherty@aol.com or envision@woz.org.

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