Unison Internet tv boxes

Enda Murphy

Does anybody here have any ideas why they didnt take off ? At the time a computer cost IR£1000 and they seemed like such an easy way for everybody to get online, Was it that most irish people just had no interest in the internet in the 90s?

bluemachaveli

They were awful to use to be honest. We got one free through Chorus at the time, I think. I still cringe thinking back now on all the hours I wasted trying to use the feckin thing. Scrolling webpages was a nightmare and it took forever to render.

OK idea but badly implemented.

Explosive_Cornflake

Text was very readable/very hard to look at on a CRT TV.
If LCD's were the rage back then they would have taken off.
They used 56k modems, I don't believe the internet really took off until broadband became available. I did suffer a 56k connection for years though.

Capt'n Midnight

Unison was £299 and was little more than a modem with a keyboard

Playstation 2 was £100 more and it could play games, DVD's and surf too
IIRC the PS/2 wasn't even that much more than some standalone DVD players

Compare to the PS/2 the unison was very low spec. And while new PC's cost a grand you could pick up a windows 95 machine (5 years old by then) for a fraction of that price which would have far more functionality.

http://www.iolfree.ie/~icdg/chorus_unison.htm

The most well known version is that sold for £299 in electrical retailers (If you live in the North - while you cannot subscribe to Unison - you can have one of these boxes for £5 a month on top of an ONdigital subscription). This is a dial-up box that offers free access to the internet through a 56KBPS modem- telephone charges apply.

Solair

Well, considering that you only get about 480 lines of actual resolution on a standard PAL display. (410 on NTSC) so computer-generated text looks awful.

galvo_clare

I remember playing around with a very early box - it might even have been pre-release. Myself and a friend, a complete Linux head, spend hours trying
to get it even to connect.
Hopeless rubbish, that's why they didn't take off!

Bebo Rocks

Someone was taking the piss on adverts.ie recently, trying to sell one for for €200.

Pen.Island

Does anyone know what the homepage was on eircom internet? Nostalgia.

demanufactured

tinet.ie