How the Commodore Amiga Powered Your Cable System in the ’90s
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-the-commodore-amiga-powered-your-cable-system-in-the-90s

The life and death of the Prevue channel, which showed you what to watch.

the magazine was already looking awful obsolete in the 1980s and 1990s, when cable systems around the country began dedicating entire channels to listing TV schedules.

For cable providers, the Amiga’s capabilities for displaying content on a television were a bit of a godsend. Previous offerings, such as the Atari 800, were able to put messages onto a television screen, though not without much in the way of pizzazz.

As a result, the Amiga quickly became the cable industry’s computer of choice in the pre-HDTV era, especially after the release of NewTek’s Video Toaster in 1990. Video Toaster, which at first was only compatible with the Amiga, made it possible to do complex video editing at a small fraction of the cost of specialized professional video-editing platforms, and that made it popular with public-access TV stations.

“We showed the Toaster recently at the National Association of Broadcasters show—this is where the engineers go to buy their stuff—and they came by the booth. They said things like, ‘This is unbelievable, this is revolutionary that you can do this in a box for this price,’” Newtek’s Paul Montgomery said in a 1990 interview

Video Toaster was so successful that it upstaged the Amiga platform as a whole, particularly in the United States. While Commodore shut down in 1994, Newtek is still around.

Like Newtek and its Video Toaster, UVSG was more successful with the Prevue Channel than Commodore itself was with the Amiga.

But ultimately, the technology was fallible, and it, too, is something cable fans remember the Prevue Guide for. The Amiga was known for its unusual error messages, particularly “Guru Meditation,” which was its equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death. Sometimes, the error would appear while the Prevue Guide was playing, which led to some interesting on-screen displays. And since this was TV, everyone in your neighborhood would see these displays.

Using obsolete technology is far from something that is specific to television, of course. Just ask the ATM industry, which used IBM’s OS/2 operating system for nearly two decades after its commercial demise.