[James2001]

One thing that's unfortunate, I've heard plenty about the old laserdisc system The Box used to use until 2000, but I've never seen any photos or videos of it. And as most cable companies ran the channel themselves from their own headends, there would have seen several systems out there. And presumably god knows how many laserdiscs themselves produced over the years- I wonder if any are still floating about?

From what I can gather, post-2000 it was just run from a Windows PC. Which used to crash a LOT when they first started using the system, sometimes you could be getting several reboots an hour, and it would crash again before even getting to the end of the first video (which was always the same song after each reboot, from what I could tell they had a pre-programmed playlist that played after each reboot, or if there were no requests left in the queue... you quite quickly worked out what the first few songs on each week's pre-programmed playlist was because of how frequent crashes and the phone lines going down were). And you could tell when they switched to a backup system, as Ahe colour of the captions was different.

After a reboot, by following what selections were being made you could work out what was going to be played, and when (at least until it crashed again).

All the crashes leading to all the previous requests being erased in the 2000-01 era would have been a scandal only few years later when all the premium rate controversy happened, and all the Box channels dropped the request format around the same time that kicked off anyway. Though I did read somewhere that the last few years before then, it wasn't a true jukebox any more, they just looked at what was requested and formatted a playlist based around it.