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Member
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Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown | | |
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| Quote:
damocles wrote:
@Fransexy
Quote:
| Funny and ironic words from a men that designed the PIOS One (a mere PC with a PowerPC cpu) and wanted it to be the next gen AmigaOS compatible machine |
No, it was a quad PPC CPU mobo and he and Andy were working CAOS which, IIRC, ended up in their Met@Box STB.
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There was no CPU on the motherboard. The CPU card I designed has a PPC603 built-in, and the PPC standard "upgrade socket" for a second/replacement CPU. I also designed the whole motherboard. Another engineer at PIOS, Thomas Rudloff, designed the quad PPC604 card, which also had L2 cache. He also designed the CPU cards for the various Mac compatible systems we did release in '96-'97, including the world's first shipping Mac-compatible at 300MHz.
We were not working on CaOS in the PowerPC/PIOS days, that came later. After the PowerPC stuff was killed, we decided to go into advanced set top boxes. The ultimate goal was to deliver what was essentially a personal computer for your livingroom. But of course, you couldn't call it that, or people would think "PC".
After the PPC thing, too, we changed the company name to Metabox. The primary reason was that someone somewhere had used that name for a software package, something like that, and was suing.
We had an OEMed basic internet terminal, the Metabox 100. We developed the first one, the Metabox 500, based on very cheap PC parts. We wanted BeOS, but Be, Inc. was very insistant on $50/copy, which didn't fly for what was basically a $200 machine. We were running Linux for awhile, but back then, we could find no Linux engineers who actually wanted to work on Linux for a living, at least not in Germany. So we went with IBM's OS/2... with zillions of ATMs being controlled by OS/2, IBM understood the need for a $10 or $5 OS.
Anyway, on that machine, the whole GUI ran in Netscape. It could play basic videos in MPEG-1, simple internet games, etc. It wasn't quite what we wanted, but we had a clear need to get into a new business fast. It also had this thing I helped develop, based on a project between the German Telekom and the University of Dresden, the BOT (Broadcast Online Television) modem. This allowed a steady 80kb/s of data to be hidden in a normal analog television signal, without interfering with any of the other stuff that used to be hidden there. Or we could take over the whole channel and run at 4Mb/s. The idea here was simple: in Germany, as much of Europe, users had to pay per minute for dialup of any kind, even POTS. So if we pushed out the most requested web content (the boxes ran an Apache web server), they'd have to actually hit the net much less often.
The real project was internally called Phoenix (the company's rebirth, in theory) and wound up as the Metabox 1000. That's the one we developed CaOS for. Actually, Andy was working with a licensed OS called Nucleus, and not too happy with it. One of other top SW guys, Carsten Scholte, had started developing an Amiga-like OS on his own, and that eventually became CaOS. The OS was very much an updated AmigaOS-like OS... you'll find this has happened a bunch of times in the power-Commodore world (in fact, the multitasking OS that runs on the React and Sensor digital R/C controllers I developed at Nomadio run a very Amiga-like OS, designed by Scott Drysdale and Frank Sczerba).
In fact, it was so Amiga-like, we were hiring Amiga developers to port their stuff. The "desktop" was again primarily via the browser, but it was Voyager... we funded the upgrade of V to a "version 4" class browser,,, there were even custom HTML tags for things like video overlay. The main UI was via MUI, etc. This was, in fact, the only thing I did at Metabox or anywhere else I'd claim is essentially Amiga-like as a whole.
And in fact, the hardware was similar to Amiga, too. It didn't have Amiga chips, but I used a VGA-like chip with a blitter, and some extra features like video overlays... this let us put DVD or other add-on video in a Window, too expensive to do in software in those days. The CPU was a 5307 Coldfire, so even the instruction set was Amiga like (we ran the core at 90MHz or 144MHz, the main SDRAM memory bus up to 75MHz... decent enough for a set-top box in 1998). It did USB, also had feature slots. One was a network interface module that could be Ethernet, POTS, or ISDN.... and possibly cable modem, had we kept going. The other was a video coprocessor slot, the first was the video module that did DVD and DVB.. the only device in the world at the time that did both of these.
When I helped jump-start Metabox USA, we were actually in talks with a number of companies, including the Amiga, Inc. of 2000, for application middleware. We actually had the MHP Java stuff pretty much working, as part of DVB, but I was looking for something higher performance. Amiga, Inc.'s Intent-based stuff seemed fairly reasonable. I wanted a VM, so that we could change the CPU any time we liked.
Metabox also ran an ISP, and developed head-end tools for pushing content directly to the STBs, via cable/satellite, authored to look good on TV of the day. The main customer for the Metabox 1000 was cable companies in Europe... we had one company planning to order 500,000 in Israel, and a consortium called NorDig looking for 1.5 million (I was actually involved in putting that deal together).
But along the way, the managment kind of got that whole Internet Company disease, the one that made plenty of companies go insane. So they spent huge chunks of money on things we didnt need, yet. And when the 2000 crashes came, all of sudden Metabox was running low on money. Worse yet, the way the company was organized, we had a large number of contract developers.. who had to be the first to be let go -- Germany has very strong employee protection laws (one reason you don't hear of all that many German startup companies).
I was primarily doing the Metabox USA thing when this was happening .. the hardware was mostly done, we were waiting on software. Thing about an STB, it's kind of a like a smartphone is sold today: you need the main machine, but some specialized hardware for your network interfaces, apps for TV, DVD, email, web, etc. In the USA, we were looking at the Metabox 1000 more for IPTV, since satellite and cable were not standards based as in Europe. We we taking meetings with Enron (yeah, that Enron, in Dallas TX... Metabox USA was based in Austin) and Blockbuster. Needless to say, Metabox wasn't the only crash-and-burn story that year  |
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