On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 05:44:52PM -0500, CBurroughs_at_aol.com wrote:
> Hello Friend,
> I actually have an old Qube box in my closet. The weird thing is that it
> doesn't work on any other cable systems, except the old qube system.
The old QUBE system is no more (at least not in Columbus, OH, where it
started). My family had it from day zero (including all the billing bugs
that were so bad that for the first month, all the movies were free).
> You know much about how they work? I would like to get this one to work.
I know *nothing* about how cable boxes work. I presume they are a mass of
switched filter elements, but beyond that, I think most of the magic of
Qube happened at the other end.
> I have opened the unit, but see nothing wrong that would cause it to
> power up and then the display goes dead.
Perhaps it doesn't see the right signal from the central cable office?
Perhaps you have one of the later units that has a tamper switch?
What does your "pendant" look like? Is it the oldest one that's mostly
roundish with a cylindrical magnetic "key" at the top? Is it newer
with a wafer key at the cable box?
The very oldest boxes could be coaxed to give up free movies by pressing
all five "response" buttons, then switching the column from either "C"
or "T" to "P". The corresponding LED would not change, but the channel
would. You could then select P1 to P10 with the row buttons, and the
system would not notice. The next generation box could be tricked by
holding a speaker magnet underneath and switching columns. After that,
you had to pry open the pendant and stick a paper clip in the correct
rivet hole in the response button switch bank (I forget which one).
Finally, they modified the box to send back billing pulses when a
premium channel was being displayed (but you could build an analog
filter to block it). The last incarnation would cut you off if it
was sending out premium content and did not get any billing pulses in
a 15 minute interval (you had to call them up on the phone to turn
your service back on). That was pretty much the end of free pay-per-view
Qube.
All this information is, um, anecdotal, naturally. :-)
-ethan
P.S. - years after we cancelled Qube for repeated billing screwups,
I ended up working with one of the office managers and one of the
Qube billing programmers at Software Results. Heard some interesting
stories about why things were so screwed up in the early days, but
they translate to overeager executives and unrealistic deadlines
made worse by decreasing funding (interactive cable implies locally
produced programming which became too expensive to produce year after
year).
--
Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 20-Jan-2004 16:20 Z
South Pole Station
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Ethan.Dicks_at_amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html
Received on Tue Jan 20 2004 - 10:41:13 GMT