[upbeat jazzy music] [computer buzzes, beeps]
All right so check out this weirdness! I don’t know how else to put this except it looks
like an accident, like a laptop with the screen snapped off. But it actually never had a screen,
it came this way from the factory. And the closer you look, the more questions arise.
It’s from 1999 but only has a floppy drive, no CD-ROM drive and not even a hard drive.
It has a trackpad but not one for fingers, it’s for this stylus. It runs its own operating
environment with a custom UI, but it’s based on Windows 3.1. And oh my god it has a 486-like
processor inside, this is a legit PC. Wait, what’s with the Commodore 64 logo?
Ahh it's also a C64, what’s going on?! [chuckles] There is so much delightful weirdness it’s
hard to know where to begin! The branding is weird, the form factor’s weird, the specs
are weird, the OS is weird, the fact it released when it did is weird. It breaks my brain a
bit so let’s just dive in! This is the Web.it Internet Computer by Web Computer International.
It sold exclusively in Europe, with mine from Germany costing around 600 Deutsche Marks
upon its launch there in 1999. As a point of comparison, 600 DM was the same cost as
a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3500 GPU alone in ‘99, so a whole PC for that price was pretty low indeed.
And that was the idea, the Web.it was designed as a low-cost computer in the tradition of
the original Commodore 64, primarily to be plugged into a TV and connect to the world
wide web. It wasn’t just focused on the one task though, like the then-popular WebTV
set-top boxes were. Instead the Web.it was also a proper PC, complete with drives, I/O,
and expandability. Manufactured by Aztech Systems in Singapore, with the machine itself
designed and marketed by Web Computers International in the Netherlands Antilles. As for how they
got the C64 brand, eh it’s a messy web of liquidations and acquisitions from the days
when anyone touching the Commodore brand was seemingly cursed. Commodore International
sold their assets to Escom AG in 1995, who themselves went bankrupt in 1996, with the
Amiga brand being sold to Gateway and Escom Netherlands buying the Commodore trademark,
renaming themselves Commodore NL. Who soon fell apart and were bought by Tulip Computers,
who were having their own financial woes and in 1998 licensed the Commodore 64 brand to
Web Computers. And they themselves were defunct by the end of 2000, buuuut
before their demise they managed to release the Web.it Internet Computer! It was announced
at the tail end of ‘98 as a planned series of low-cost internet appliances/personal computers,
with all kinds of upgrades, add-ons, and accessories that never happened, far as I can tell. But
their affordability and hardware made them relatively popular with hobbyists. And for
a while plenty were available complete in box on eBay, which is how I imported mine
from Germany years ago. Despite that, several items it came with are Dutch, namely the box
and documentation, each of which are printed in a combination of Dutch with some English.
The computer on the other hand, both the software and the keyboard itself, are German. It’s
been a while since I’ve used a QWERTZ layout board, but it didn’t take too long to reorient
myself. Mostly it’s the modifier keys, symbols, and punctuation that took the most getting
used to, otherwise it’s an okay membrane board
with just enough key travel to instill some typing confidence.
[plasticky membrane typing sounds]
The trackpad, on the other hand, does not function how you’d think. It’s pressure-sensitive,
but using a finger to move the cursor never feels quite right, it’s too imprecise and
jittery. And the surface is slick and glossy, like the LCD screen of a PDA. It looks a bit
like liquid crystal too when you press down on it hard enough, and the sucker’s even
polarized, which makes me think it’s an LCD with no visual data running through it.
So yeah, this is meant to work entirely with a stylus, where you move the on-screen cursor
around using the pen tip, and click by either tapping or pressing the buttons below the
pad. It’s a little sketchy at first since the pad is so small but it’s quite accurate,
far more than using a finger. I also quite like how they included this little hole above
the keyboard specifically to hold the stylus, rather than sliding it back into its storage
slot. I’ve seen this on drawing tablets but never on a computer like this. There are
no USB or PS/2 ports, but you do get the usual serial and parallel, plus a 15-pin gameport/MIDI
interface. As well as an infrared transceiver on the front, right next to the system status
LEDs. A 56k Flex dial-up modem is naturally built in, being an “Internet Computer”
and all that. Though you do have two PCMCIA slots for Type II and III PC-Cards, so adding
Ethernet is theoretically possible, though drivers and software is a challenge due to
the OS. And it’s all displayed via your choice of VGA, S-Video, or composite output
ports, right next to the 3.5mil audio jacks. On that note,
let’s get this fired up real quick and see what we’re workin’ with!
[computer powers on, floppy drive clunks]
[PCMCIA startup beep, floppy drive grunting]
Yeah, beyond that 3.5” floppy check, the machine is silent. No fans, no hard drive,
no spinning disks till one’s inserted. The only sounds begin once the OS is loaded and
its theme plays through your speakers.
[embOS startup sound plays]
Well isn’t that pleasant. Say hello to embOS! Or EMB OS, emboss? Either way, “emb”
stands for “embedded” here, and it comes from none other than IBM. Sort of. What we’re
really looking at is a custom graphical shell for Windows 3.1 embedded, which is itself
running under IBM PC-DOS version 7. A software combo reportedly developed by IBM for a canceled
set-top box project of theirs codenamed ‘Bronco.’ There are multiple pages of up to six application
shortcuts, divided up into categories for things like productivity, internet, games,
multimedia, systems settings and so on. And this is really where you’re meant to spend
basically all your time, with Netscape Navigator 3 for your 90s web browsing needs, Lotus 1-2-3,
Word Pro, and Organizer for spreadsheets, word processing, and such. And shortcuts to
many of the standard Windows 3.1 applications like Write, Notepad, the calculator and clock,
Paintbrush, Media Player and so on. And yep, MIDI support is here and it’s not bad!
[FM synth rendition of PASSPORT.MID plays]
However, what we’ve seen here is largely what we get, with limited customization. It’s
all German all the time on this model, and it’s a PAL machine meant for PAL TVs. So
there’s a 50Hz vertical refresh across both TV and VGA output, at least with both outputs
enabled at once, which makes sense. Otherwise you can disable TV out that’ll put it into
60Hz mode when going through VGA alone. And while embOS has the core programs, it’s
still an über simplified 3.1 experience, and many expected bits just aren’t here.
Like it’s missing the full Control Panel, you’ve no access to drivers or Windows Setup, you
can’t customize aesthetics, can’t make your own program groups. There aren’t even
any screensavers! But you can run Windows 3.1 applications outside of those it comes
with, provided they don’t require any software or libraries that it doesn’t like. So things
like SimCity and Lemmings for Windows don’t run for me at all, but the likes of SkiFree
and Jezzball are just fine. Speaking of other software, as I’ve said there’s no hard
drive inside, despite all the stuff on here. Soooo what’s up? Well, it’s relying on
a combo of flash memory, read-only memory, and a RAM drive. All of which are custom Stacker
partitions. The C: drive is the only one you can permanently write to, with roughly 3½
megabytes of compressed flash storage available. There is an internal IDE header, but exceedingly
little room inside the case, so even a flash card interface would be tight. The largest
chunk of storage in the Web.it is the D: drive, a 16MB ROM permanently filled with the operating
system and all of its bundled applications. Finally the E: drive is a simple RAM disk,
making use of a couple megs of main system memory. This is temporary storage that’s
cleared on every reboot, and it’s used for shadowing certain files on the D: drive. Which
is how it deals with that drive being read-only; it makes writable shadowed duplicates for
settings files. Even then you’re still largely stuck with what’s in ROM, since by default
the Web.it does not allow booting from either floppy disk or external drives. Which is too
bad, since the PC-DOS side is mighty limited in terms of conventional memory. With only
around 400-450K free due to the drivers and software forced to load from ROM on startup.
And that’s after modifying the autoexec file to clean things up! CONFIG.SYS is locked
off, and the ROM DOS install doesn’t include an expanded memory manager. Still, games that
have their own memory manager will play just fine, with SVGA support from the 1MB CyberPro
2010 graphics and full Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 support
from the Aztech Sound Galaxy chip inside.
[Doom gameplay commences]
And that’s just the PC side of things! This is also a “Commodore 64,” so press the
Chicken Lips key plus F8, or tap the C64 shortcut in the OS. And that brings up the classic
blue C64 BASIC prompt, ready for input. Through software anyway. Because this is nothing more
than an emulator running in DOS, specifically CCS64, which has been around since 1995. It’s
a version from 1998, so compatibility isn’t the best and it’s missing a slew of later
updates and fixes, but still. It fulfills the promise of the Web.it Internet Computer
also being Commodore 64-compatible, to a degree, technically. Ehh it looks great on a CRT,
but heh-huhh... man, is this not a well fleshed out emulator. I mean, it’s doing what it
can in DOS of hardware of this time but it obviously needed a lot more work still. And
let’s just be honest, the hardware itself is not really up to snuff.
[sluggish, choppy Boulderdash gameplay]
And of course it doesn’t come with any software, you’ve gotta provide things like TAP, CRT,
or D64 files yourself to load from virtual cassettes, cartridges, or floppies. But Web
Computers themselves encouraged finding such things quote, “on the internet,” so hey
isn’t it convenient it’s an Internet Computer! Oh and this set of shortcuts it came with
is amusing, check this out. These allow you to quickly load C64 programs from the two
PC Card slots or the 3.5” diskette drive, so that makes me wonder... did they expect
you to write these yourself? Or did they plan on selling game compilations? Like look at
those Commodore logos on the cards, [chuckles] how cool would it be to have officially licensed
PCMCIA memory cards full of C64 games! I have no evidence
that was their plan, but I can dream.
And well. I can dream about a lotta things being better, or at least different, with
the Web Computers Internet Computer. For all its quirky mashups of 1990s ideas and technology,
in the end it’s a highly compromised machine that doesn’t excel at being a Commodore
64 or a PC. Don’t get me wrong, that’s what makes if fascinating! But it’s also
a shame, especially on the PC side, cuz it’s real close to being a sweet slimline DOS rig
if it weren’t for... the way it is. The inability to fully, easily bypass the built-in
ROM means the OS is just what it is and conventional memory management sucks. There’s no way
to access the BIOS that I can find, and there’s no mention of it in the manual. And there’s
some awful 2-key rollover, affecting the arrow keys in particular, which yikes, that’s
bad for a lotta games. And with nowhere to plug in a PS/2 keyboard, ehh, oh well right?
At the same time though, internally it’s no slouch. Slow by 1999 standards, yes, and
I bet it chugged online as websites were becoming more complex. But I choose to think of it
as solid by 1993 standards, when the hardware inside would’ve been less obsolete. And
for what it cost back in ‘99, that’s an acceptable trade-off! The C64 side of things
is lackluster, no question about that. But for the DOS side, the sound and graphics are
actually decent! Its 16 megs of RAM is plenty for DOS games, and it’s upgradeable to 32.
And the AMD ELAN SC400 inside is clocked at 66MHz with a 33MHz bus. Putting performance
roughly in the range of a 66MHz Intel 486 DX2. All good stuff for DOS. And Web Computers
actively tried to cultivate a community around it, with a webpage called the Web.it Chatbase.
Though they quickly found that the internet was the internet, closing it down before long
“Due to the disturbing contents of the chatbase.” [chuckles] Ah a tale as old as time. The company
also released an English model in the UK, in really limited numbers, I’ve only ever
seen one of them online. They even planned a Windows CE-based successor! But while it
appeared at trade shows, the product was DOA, and Web Computers fizzled out and shut down
around the end of 2000. And the Commodore license went onto be acquired and given up
and reacquired again who knows how many times. Yeah, I find this whole darn system and the
surrounding circumstances downright captivating. And the unusual feature set and limitations
of the Web.it computer itself really make it stand out from the vintage crowd, for better
and worse. It’s a mess of things I appreciate,
and I hope you enjoyed this look at it with me!
[jazz tunes and Rise of the Triad playing]
So hey if you had one of these back in the day, or perhaps even modified it to run another
OS, lemme know your experiences in the comments! And if you like this type of thing then stick
around, new LGR videos are always coming soon. And as usual, thanks for watching.