If you don't remember, or if you weren't into PCs back in the early 1990s, but PCs were not as "powerful" in the past as they are now. What? You mean PCs didn't always record TV shows? Well, no. One has to consider the history of the development of video codec formats, the development of PC hardware, PC storage and PC memory, and the introduction of TV Tuner cards during the 1990s in tracing a "history" of sorts for what led to the development of TiVo-like video recording on PC-based systems. So, the following is a quick nutshell "history" of PC-based video capturing and TV. (Okay, a lot has been left out like MPEG4, DivX, and WMV etc. but those are more for current history.... Also, don't expect any discussion of HDTV, SDTV, EDTV on this page.)
 
As for video codec formats, Apple introduced Quicktime in 1992. Microsoft introduced the AVI format a few months after Quicktime. MPEG1 began approvals in 1992 and became official in 1994 -- although beginning in 1993 there were VCDs, which were using MPEG1, despite that laserdiscs were perhaps more dominant. MPEG2 began approvals in 1994 and became official in 1996 -- SVCDs which use MPEG2 were introduced in 1998. As a comparison, DVD standards, which use MPEG2 but with different settings, didn't become official until 1995 (DVD players then began selling in 1996 in Japan and began selling in 1997 in the US). One major point about these video formats (and subsequent ones such as MPEG4, DivX, and WMV) is that with each development the video recording files of movies and shows became smaller although the video files are still rather large files.
 
And you have the PC hardware evolution. In the first half of the 90s you're dealing with 386, 486, and Pentium I CPUs (the Pentium CPU arrived in about 1993) with maybe 4 meg of memory (if that) and puny harddrives. Prior to 1995 and Windows 95, you're also talking about DOS, Windows 3.1x, and OS/2 as the operating system on these early PCs. VCA frame-grabber capture cards were introduced in 1990 or 1989 for single-frame captures, and then sometime later you had the IBM M-Motion Adapter with full-frame buffer for those old IBM PS/2 workstations, and then later you had the IBM Action Media II card that could record full-motion 30 fps digitized video in around 1993 or so. The actual beginning of the TV Tuner card for watching television on the PC was in 1992 with Animation Technologies Inc. (a.k.a. Lifeview) and also Hauppauge in the same year introducing the first TV Tuner cards for the PC. (ATI did not bring out its first ATI XCLAIM TV card for Macintosh, its first ATI TV card for PC, and its first ATI All-In-Wonder card for PC until August 1996, October 1996 and November 1996 respectively) The FAT16 limitation for these systems restricts file sizes and drive sizes to no more than two gigabytes in size. Apple had a similar limitation in those days. So that with those puny harddrives, which could only be a couple hundred megabytes or most likely a whole lot less for most clone PCs in those early days, then any video recording would have to be small in size and short in time. Also, any TV Tuner cards that were packaged with a recording capability did not have a hardware encoder but instead used a software encoder (even nowadays, there are very few TV Tuner cards with a hardware encoder but expect that to change given more time). The result is that any recording activity was CPU intensive. If you think TV recording using only software on a PC nowadays can be CPU intensive, then imagine how much it would be (or how impossible it could be) if you were stuck with the lower powered CPUs of the early- to mid-1990s.
 

Mac TV didn't record in 1993

As to whether there was any sort of "Media Center PC" in the early 1990s, the NEC Laptop TV with a built-in television tuner and antenna debuted at the Laptop Expo in Chicago, Illinois in October 1991 -- but the laptop TV did not record and was only for watching TV. And the Mac TV was announced in October 1992 but did not begin full distribution until 1993. The Mac TV was basically for watching TV and could only do single frame captures and not full-motion video recording.
 
Not really video recording, but Intel released Intercast for data broadcasting in 1995 and corresponding Intercast receiver software was bundled with some TV tuner cards and was also included with the optional "WebTV for Windows" software in Windows 98. Data broadcasting would slowly send web-type information with TV transmissions to be received by TV Tuner cards running Intercast. Also, "WebTV for Windows" included as an option with Win98 was used for watching TV (assuming you had a TV Tuner card installed), had an EPG, but had no recording capability for the PC. However, you couldn't watch TV and receive the Intercast data at the same time -- you had to leave the TV software off in order for Intercast to take over the TV Tuner card in order to receive the data. If you used Win98 but never heard of Intercast or "WebTV for Windows," then that's not surprising because these were options that you had to specifically select for installation from the Win98 CD. The Microsoft-Intel specification for these type of systems in those days was the "Entertainment PC" for watching TV via antenna broadcasts or cable TV -- but nothing was mentioned about recording in the spec. (Microsoft apparently didn't begin planning for recording on harddrives until 1999 and 2000 in developing plans for UltimateTV in response to TiVo; also click here for some of my other comments about the Microsoft WinXP MCE and Media Center PC business model.)
 
Then you will have to track the evolution of the harddrive. It was only recently within the last few years or so it would seem when harddrive costs started reaching $1 per gigabyte. We start moving towards "modern" history with the initial planning of WebTV in 1995 (although WebTV co-founders Steve Perlman, Bruce Leak, and Phil Goldman were certainly thinking of WebTV-type boxes in their earlier Apple days) and particularly with the subsequent inclusion of a harddrive in a version of the WebTV Plus in 1998 for data storage (the AOLTV box in 2000 was also deployed with a harddrive for data storage). Then we have the introduction of TiVo and ReplayTV which of course had harddrives for video storage beginning towards the end of 1998 with the TiVo and ReplayTV boxes going into wide distribution in 1999. So, 1998 and particularly 1999 would be the starting points for the "modern" history of TiVo-like harddrive video recording.
 
And then you have PC users working to transform their systems into TiVo-like PVR boxes beginning in 1999 with Klaus Schmidinger's early version of his homebrew linux-based VDR (Video Disk Recorder) although Klaus would say the idea of competing with TiVo or ReplayTV wasn't on his mind. After TiVo and ReplayTV debuted in the set-top world, the "modern" history of harddrive video recording in the PC world could be documented with the Klaus Schmidinger VDR (Linux) in 1999, Snapstream Personal Video Station (Windows) in 2000, Showshifter (Windows) in 2000, Videoblaster Digital VCR (Windows) in 2001, SageTV (Windows) in 2001, MythTV (Linux) in 2002, and then the late-comer Windows XP Media Center Edition (Microsoft) in 2002. The years mentioned are for the initial work on each PVR software program prior to each program's formal introduction. There are other recording software for the PC, but I'm talking about what can be called the first major TiVo-like PC-based recording software (in terms of TiVo-like recording capability and with a TV-friendly screen interface without looking like a typical PC windows program).
 
So, that's a quick nutshell "history." You have to keep in mind that technology approaching anything similar to TiVo-like recording in the early 1990s would most likely be the professional video editing equipment costing perhaps thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. Any *EXTENSIVE* use of recording equipment in the *EARLY* days prior to TiVo by consumers or enthusiasts it would seem to me would probably be the simple hooking up of a VCR to a TV Tuner card or to a video capture card where the PC with the TV Tuner card merely acted as a dumb terminal displaying whatever is playing on the VCR. (Hey, I did that because it was easy to do!) So, if you are now entering into the PC-based world of PC-TV HTPC PVRs, Personal Video Recorders, a.k.a. DVRs, Digital Video Recorders, as the equivalent set-top boxes are called in the cable TV and satelitte TV worlds, then be thankful that you don't have to go through waiting for technology to get better, larger in capacity, and cheaper. Enjoy!
 
Happy PC-TV Watching!
Ruel