Apple TV Prototype Listed on eBay

An Apple TV prototype called the Apple Interactive Television Box has been listed on eBay for sale.

A friend who is a former Oracle employee gave this to me in the late '90s, and I just came across it again after going through some boxes that were in storage for 10 years. Does it work? I don't know. Back in the day, I kept it on a shelf as a conversation piece. It is supposed to come with a remote, but I was never given one.

TheAppleMuseum.com offers the following information about the box, "In cooperation with British Telecom (later renamed BT), Apple started developing an interactive TV set top box in 1993. Initial prototypes were tested internally only, but in 1994, Apple and BT launched a ITV trial in Britain with approximately 2,500 households participating. The media server technology was provided by Oracle. Later, the trail was expanded to Belgium where Apple was cooperating with Belgacom. A six-state US trial phase was announced in May 1995 featuring an educational programming by The Lightspan Partnership, Inc.

The final version of the Interactive Television Box featured a 68040 processor, 4 MB RAM, a 2 MB ROM and a MPEG-1 decoder. The boot-OS was a subset of the MacOS with QuickDraw and QuickTime software. It was equipped with stereo audio RCA jacks, one Mac serial port, one S-Video, RF in, RF out, one RJ-45 Ethernet, one ADB port and a HDI-30 SCSI port and dual SCART connectors. Furthermore, it also featured a proprietary expansion slot, one additional DIMM socket and a floppy drive connector (earlier models still featured a floppy drive and had to be booted from floppy disks). A PAL and a NTSC version were produced in very limited quantities.


The project was canceled in late 1995 when it became obvious that ITV wasn't going to become commercially successful anytime soon."

Looks like the listing got some press attention a little too late. It sold for only $46.

Read More [via AppleInsider]