Qube was grand experiment with short shelf life “H
appy Qube Day!” Forty years ago this month, people were actually saying things like that in Columbus. Perhaps not enough people.
Qube was born of the idea that anything and everything in the near future would be done via two-way cable. Everything: entertainment, education, shopping, banking, and even democracy.
At the 20th Qube reunion when the emcee spoke to the assembled veterans, the speaker asked people to raise their hands in reply if the question resonated with them: “How many of you think you invented MTV?”
That question got some hands in the air, but more laughs than hands, and the people whose hands were in the air looked cheerfully red-faced.
After all, the whole Qube thing was a little embarrassing, even for the clown.
On Dec. 1, 1977, Warner Cable, a division of Warner Communications — remember that version of the corporation? — declared “Qube Day” and promised to transform Columbus and the world.
In fact, Qube Day was an internationally anticipated moment in the history of consumer technology that gathered every known and dreamed-of service into a 30-channel bundle and sent it into 35,000 homes in Columbus. People who signed up were equipped with a box and a hand-held console — “the Qube” — connected to the box with a cord 25 feet long. There were 35 push-button options on the “Qube.”
Those were the days of three or four channels of over-the-air broadcast television, or basic cable systems with a dozen or fewer channels, most of which were simply broadcast TV sent through wires into homes from a community antenna (hence community antenna television, or CATV, as “cable” was initially known). This transformative service was billed as something way beyond cable television, but the company behind it was of course Warner Cable.
The promises at the time included interactive (or two-way) television, payper-view, local origination, special children’s programming, and for-credit college courses. (Not mentioned so much was a particular channel dedicated to adult movies.) Out of this bold and expensive experiment emerged various entities that had a longer life than Qube itself: The Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, and even MTV.
The problem with Qube, and the reason that you’ve forgotten it (or never heard of it), was that it preceded by mere months the development of the first personal computers, which immediately signaled the numbered days of the dinosaurs that were the enormous computers behind Qube. What Qube promised was nothing short of a brave new consumer and citizen experience, and what Qube delivered is what we now think of, pejoratively, as mere cable television.
The 300 people who worked in the three-studio facility near Downtown went on to do the usual things that people in television and show business do: They become directors, producers, writers, talent, show-biz execs, advertising people, and entrepreneurs of various kinds.
The most consequential result of the grand experiment was that Warner Cable — and then Warner-Amex Cable, once American Express bought into it, temporarily — was able to win several large-city cable franchises with exclusive rights to wire the city. Of course, everything changed, not only the technology, but the politics and the business models.
We live in a wireless world now, and possibly the only reason to note the 40-year anniversary might be to reflect on the waves of changes that roll in upon us with increasing frequency and violence.
Once upon a time, the future arrived in Columbus, and now it is a bittersweet if not nostalgic — because who knew? — thing to contemplate, the quaint world where the idea that you might be able to order products and services from your own living room with the touch of a button seemed like something wonderful, futuristic, almost as if a leap into the sciencefiction dreams of the previous hundred years.
To go to the moon, yes, we proved it could be done. But to order groceries from your home, or to do banking at home, or to vote your preferences on a television show — these were the things of wild and crazy fantasy.
It’s charming now to imagine the thrill it gave a few thousand people once upon a time, when the future was still an innocent reverie.