BH
Pace DSL 4000 ran the STB branch of RiscOS 4. Pace acquired rights to RiscOS through their purchase of Acorn Computers after they went into receivership. while the part of Acorn previously spun off into Element 14 continued trading - also with rights to RiscOS. Both companies licensed their RiscOS rights, and the argument is still going on more than 20 years later about which is the true RiscOS fork, but I digress.
The box itself has enough of RiscOS onboard to attempt to boot a user environment from an NFS or Lanman share, you can set the boot address and protocol yourself in an engineering menu. I've never seen one in use in the wild, but did used to work somewhere that developed an application for them in conjunction with the BBC, and so I've only used them with the Pace baseline network boot without any operator customisation added. Without a baseline, you could plug in a keyboard and hold down * to boot to command line like a real RiscOS machine, from there BBC Basic could be loaded, or you could start desktop. This didn't get you far as there's no filer icons to browse the storage or task switcher to launch things from. The whole idea was to keep the screen clear and stop you straying from a launched applicaton.
Anyone who had an Acorn Risc OS machine may remember the ANT Internet Suite and Fresco Browser? The DSL 4000 baseline boots into a full screen version of Fresco, with the UX elements written in HTML and javascript. The box has a hardware MPEG2 decoder, which would join and decode a multicast transport stream just as an IPTV STB still does today. The MPEG decoder picture output replaces the background colour channel, and the raster was heavily overscanned (no border like a RiscOS machine) to fill beyond the edge of the screen. The browser would display an empty page to allow you to watch tv behind it, then draw the navigation elements over the top as you used the remote. The remote mapped to the keyboard keys IIRC. The DSL4000 was the world's first DSL IPTV platform, and was perhaps a little too ahead of it's time. But an interesting snapshot of the early days of how it was thought IPTV might work.
I kept the STB when we were having a clear out of the office, and burnt a copy of the baseline onto a CD, which I think is in storage with the box.
C&W/NTL/Telewest Box Revival
Finally there is Kingston which isn't a cable company but was the first IPTV provider in the UK (Although BT were testing a VOD service in 1995, it never launched) and worth a look at. They used a Pace DSL4000 which connected to an ADSL modem via ethernet. I doubt there any chance of getting the boxes to function now, they require active communication with their servers in order to function, I'm not sure if they even boot up. The software I'm not 100% sure but it may have used RISC OS with a front end called ANT which as similar in concept to Liberate. Pace did acquire element14 which owned some ARM properties and had intended to release an ARM based internet tv. This evolved into the Bush internet TV.
Pace DSL 4000 ran the STB branch of RiscOS 4. Pace acquired rights to RiscOS through their purchase of Acorn Computers after they went into receivership. while the part of Acorn previously spun off into Element 14 continued trading - also with rights to RiscOS. Both companies licensed their RiscOS rights, and the argument is still going on more than 20 years later about which is the true RiscOS fork, but I digress.
The box itself has enough of RiscOS onboard to attempt to boot a user environment from an NFS or Lanman share, you can set the boot address and protocol yourself in an engineering menu. I've never seen one in use in the wild, but did used to work somewhere that developed an application for them in conjunction with the BBC, and so I've only used them with the Pace baseline network boot without any operator customisation added. Without a baseline, you could plug in a keyboard and hold down * to boot to command line like a real RiscOS machine, from there BBC Basic could be loaded, or you could start desktop. This didn't get you far as there's no filer icons to browse the storage or task switcher to launch things from. The whole idea was to keep the screen clear and stop you straying from a launched applicaton.
Anyone who had an Acorn Risc OS machine may remember the ANT Internet Suite and Fresco Browser? The DSL 4000 baseline boots into a full screen version of Fresco, with the UX elements written in HTML and javascript. The box has a hardware MPEG2 decoder, which would join and decode a multicast transport stream just as an IPTV STB still does today. The MPEG decoder picture output replaces the background colour channel, and the raster was heavily overscanned (no border like a RiscOS machine) to fill beyond the edge of the screen. The browser would display an empty page to allow you to watch tv behind it, then draw the navigation elements over the top as you used the remote. The remote mapped to the keyboard keys IIRC. The DSL4000 was the world's first DSL IPTV platform, and was perhaps a little too ahead of it's time. But an interesting snapshot of the early days of how it was thought IPTV might work.
I kept the STB when we were having a clear out of the office, and burnt a copy of the baseline onto a CD, which I think is in storage with the box.