From Excalibur to AI

When you look at the technology Eric Weber has worked on over the last thirty years, the products themselves seem very different.

One began as a graphical bulletin board system in the early 1990s. Another became a customer engagement and live chat platform used by organizations to communicate with people online. The newest is being built around IPTV, streaming television and artificial intelligence.

On the surface, there is not much reason to connect them. Yet the same idea runs through all three.

Technology should make communication and discovery easier, not harder.

It Started With Excalibur

In 1993, online communication was still something most people had never experienced. Bulletin board systems connected early online communities, but the experience was usually built around text menus, command lines and interfaces that made sense to people who were already comfortable with computers.

Eric believed there was another way. He wanted to create something visual, something people could explore without feeling like they needed to understand the technology underneath it.

The result was Excalibur, which was commercially released in 1994 and became known as the world’s first graphical BBS.

It spread well beyond its original audience, attracted system operators and users around the world, and developed a community of people who customized it, built third-party additions and made the platform their own.

Windows Magazine named Excalibur to its Top 100 in 1995, and the product was later mentioned in BBSs for Dummies, but the recognition mattered less than what the platform represented.

It was part of a period when people were still inventing the way we would eventually interact online. There was no established model to follow, and that gave people permission to experiment.

From Bulletin Boards to the Web

As the commercial internet grew, bulletin board systems gradually gave way to websites, browsers and entirely new forms of online communication.

The original Excalibur belonged to that earlier moment, but Eric’s interest in how people communicate through technology did not end with it.

That interest continued through SmartMax Software and eventually led to ChatBeacon.

ChatBeacon, 2005

ChatBeacon began serving organizations in 2005, at a time when business websites were becoming essential but were still largely one-way experiences. Companies published information, customers read it, and if someone needed help they usually had to call, send an email or search for another way to reach the organization.

Live chat changed that. For the first time, customers could speak with someone while they were still on the website.

What seems ordinary now felt very different then because it created a direct connection between the person visiting the site and the organization behind it.

That idea grew over time. Today, ChatBeacon has evolved into a broader customer engagement platform that combines live human communication with AI-driven capabilities designed to help organizations manage conversations, assist operators and create a more intelligent path between automation and people.

The technology is far more sophisticated than it was in 2005, but the basic question remains surprisingly familiar.

How can we make the interaction easier for the person using it?

Now the Problem Is Television

That question is now carrying into ExcaliburAITV.

Television has changed enormously, but the modern streaming experience has introduced its own kind of friction. Viewers have more content than ever before, spread across more services, more channels and more interfaces. The problem is no longer access. The problem is discovery.

Finding something good to watch can mean scrolling through endless rows, switching between services, navigating categories and trying to phrase a search in exactly the right way.

People do not naturally think in menus. They think in ideas.

Someone may want a classic British mystery, a documentary about ancient civilizations, a light comedy from the 1980s, something appropriate for the whole family, or a movie that feels like one they loved years ago.

Those are normal human requests. Until recently, television software had very limited ways of understanding them.

Building Around Intent

Artificial intelligence changes that. It gives us the ability to begin building television around intent rather than exact input.

That possibility is what brought the Excalibur name back.

ExcaliburAITV is being created as a modern IPTV and streaming television experience that uses AI to make discovery feel more natural. The project begins on Apple TV, with plans extending across Apple Vision Pro, iPadOS and iOS.

The goal is not to make television feel more technical. It is the opposite.

We want the technology to do more of the work so the viewer has to do less.

Where Merlin Comes In

Merlin is being developed as part of the ExcaliburAITV experience, giving us a way to explore how an AI companion can help viewers navigate programming in a way that feels useful rather than intrusive.

The name is fun, of course. A product called Excalibur was probably destined to have a Merlin sooner or later. But the larger idea is serious.

AI should help people find what they want without making the experience feel like operating another piece of software.

The Thread

That philosophy connects this project to everything that came before it.

The original Excalibur used graphics to make early online communication more approachable. ChatBeacon used live chat, and now AI, to help people communicate with organizations more naturally. ExcaliburAITV is applying the same instinct to television discovery.

The technologies are different, but the questions are not.

Can we remove friction? Can we make the interface feel more intuitive? Can we give people a better way to find what they are looking for? Can we make technology feel less like a system they have to learn and more like something that simply works the way they expect it to?

Those questions have followed Eric from the earliest days of Excalibur through SmartMax Software, ChatBeacon and now back to Excalibur again.

That is why this new project feels less like a restart and more like a continuation.

Not a Nostalgia Project

It also explains why we are not treating ExcaliburAITV as a nostalgia project.

We are proud of the history. It is part of the story. But the reason to bring Excalibur back is not because the past was interesting. It is because the technology in front of us is interesting now.

Artificial intelligence is opening the door to new kinds of interfaces and new ways of interacting with information, and television is one of the areas where that change feels especially overdue.

We want to see what happens when discovery becomes conversational. We want to see what happens when the interface begins to understand context instead of relying only on exact commands. We want to see whether television can feel more personal without becoming more complicated.

And the People Using It

As with the original Excalibur, we want the people using it to help shape what comes next. That part matters.

The first Excalibur developed a real community around it because people did more than use the software. They added to it, challenged it and found things to do with it that were never part of the original plan.

We hope ExcaliburAITV develops some of that same energy.

The platforms have changed. The audience has changed. The world is almost unrecognizable compared with the one Excalibur entered in 1994. But the instinct to look at an established experience and imagine something better has not changed at all.

That is the thread connecting Excalibur, ChatBeacon and ExcaliburAITV.

More than thirty years later, it is still leading somewhere new. A new generation of Excalibur has begun.