Plus, hardware decoders for the format already existed, meaning the device wouldn't have to rely on the CPU for smooth playback.Īpple developed manufactured the STBs in their Austin, Texas campus. All of this was to occur using MPEG-1 video with QuickTime as the playback system, specifically selected because of MPEG-1's bitrate of 1.5Mbit/sec and enough to run over a T1/E1 line. Apple forged an alliance with Oracle and parallel computing vendor nCube (Larry Ellison then being its single biggest stockholder), with Apple developing the front end client box and nCube boxes running Oracle Media Server handling the back end. The dominance of the Apple TV today is a late phenomenon Apple was in no position to launch such a product on their own in that era, though with the recent introduction of their QuickTime multimedia framework in 1991, they were a strong candidate for a technology partner. The AITB/STB was Apple's attempt to get into the early set-top box market of the 1990s. And that's what we're going to dig into - and reprogram! - today. Well, it turns out Apple themselves were the first ones to implement a flashable Mac OS ROM volume in 1994, but hardly anyone noticed - because it was only ever used publicly in a minority subset of one of the most unusual of the Macintosh-derived systems, the Apple Interactive Television Box (a/k/a AITB or the Apple Set Top Box/STB).
For many Macs that can take a ROM SIMM, you can embed a ROM volume in the Mac ROM that can even be mirrored to a RAM disk. Classic Macs have an unusually large ROM that contains a fair bit of the Mac OS, which was true even in the G3 New World Mac era (it was just on disk), so it's somewhat surprising that only one Mac officially could boot the Mac OS entirely from ROM, namely the Macintosh Classic (hold down Cmd-Option-X-O to boot from a hidden HFS volume with System 6.0.3). One of the coolest things to come along in the 68K Mac homebrew community is the ROM Boot Disk concept.
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