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Villu Arak

Video calls more than 50 years ago

By My status Villu Arak on March 27, 2008 in Insight.

I came across a post by John McArthur, head of Walden Technology Partners and a recent convert to Skype. What got my imagination going was his experience with Skype (paired with a Logitech webcam) that sparked memories of his visit to the New York World's Fair in 1964. That year, AT&T demonstrated its Picturephone, an effort to add faces to the voices in a phone conversation. The concept never took off and AT&T now calls it "big, expensive, and uncomfortably intrusive."

It will be interesting to see how internet video calls -- and related hardware -- evolve. But for a trip back to some old-skool visions of what video communication would look like, take a look at the Bell System Memorial website. Compare that to today's flat-design fetish and see if you can conjure up the form factor of video phones that will be gracing our desktops, walls and pockets in the not-so-distant future.

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Comments

I have just purchased Skpe Pro thinking it would be a cheap way of calling my son in America. I was a little confused to see the cost of a minutes call is £0.012 (excellent value!) but I was charged £0.041 for a seven second call! Can you explain please.

sandra.mcallister | Sunday, Mar 30

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