CD-i Internet demonstration

In April 1995, SPC created a CD-i Internet demonstration disc. This disc was circulated widely within Philips; we know this because we got occasional phone calls asking for the password of the Internet account. From the original demonstration notes:

CD-i Internet Demonstration

version 0.2

Copyright (C) 1995, SPC/Vision BV

april 4, 1995
This disc contains a simple text-only WWW browser that connects to the Internet using SLIP over a serial line connected to a modem. Although the disc is set up to use NLnet, there is nothing NLnet-specific on the disc except some configuration information.

This page contains the photo's of a demonstration session using the demonstration disc. This was done in May 2005, more then ten years after the original disc was created. Instead of a modem, a direct connection to a PC running RedHat Linux was used. A CD-i KeyControl was also used, even though it did not yet exist in 1995. However, the disc supports the CD-i keyboard spec so it works okay with the KeyControl.

This is the demonstration setup. The Linux PC is not shown.

First we zoom in to the CD-i screen.

After pressing [PLAY CD-I] we get the CD-i "blue screen of load".

Next comes the title screen; we need to press [ok].

Now we need to login to the Linux PC.

After starting SLIP, we press the [slip] button.

The disc tries to go to the NLnet homepage, but this won't work.

We abort and enter our demonstration URL and press [go].

And there's our demonstration page! Note the hyperlinks in red.

The hyperlinks could be clicked for navigation, a long page could be scrolled using the arrow buttons.

There is also a history feature in the disc (not shown in this demonstration session).