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> To 1960s audiences, the Jetsons’ videophone — a big piece of hardware whose staticky screen gives way to an image of the person trying to reach you — seemed l

> To 1960s audiences, the Jetsons’ videophone — a big piece of hardware whose staticky screen gives way to an image of the person trying to reach you — seemed like a dream. In early 1936, in Germany there was the first public video telephone service, Gegensehn-Fernsprechanlagen [1] I think there were experiments in Russia and France about videophones in the 1960', and indeed in US in 1964 there was the ATT picture phone [0] And in the 1960' if you had access to a copper leased line you could send data at 2Mbits/sec, that what was in Telecoms trunks between digital PBX. And repeaters were made without any ICs, on pure twisted copper lines, without any transformers, only with a few transistors, capacitors, inductance and resistances! I taught about those lines and their equipment, early in 1980 in France. It was boring old stuff at the time, I was much more interested by microprocessors! Something funny is that in 1989 there were ISDN experiments in France and business customers (in Rennes) were surprised that it was possible to send data at 2MBits/sec on copper links. Indeed this was not possible on customers/subscribers phone lines because of transformers and PCM modulation (for the lucky ones), which limited bandwidth from ~300-3400 Hertz. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony#AT&T_Picturephone_Mod_I:_1964%E2%80%931970 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony#AT&T... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony#Closed-circuit_videophone_systems:_1936%E2%80%931940 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony#Clos...

StrictDabbler 4y ago
You have to admit, though, that it seemed like a dream that the market would ever shift to videophones. New videophones came out every few years in the 80's and 90's and failed, time and again. I saw them in Popular Mechanics, I saw them in Omni Magazine, I saw them in the bargain bin at Circuit City, still overpriced. Why would you buy this thing? What's the point of spending all the extra money on seeing the other person? Chicken and egg, most people don't have one. Won't you have to do your makeup before making a phone call? It didn't occur to many of us that your phone would be your only computer and that it would have two to six cameras so it would be a videophone by default and especially it was hard to believe the phone companies would ever let such functionality be accessed with an ordinary phone number. On its own, the videophone could never have succeeded. It had to be in a convergence device. It also never occurred to me that people would like a videophone so they can hold it at waist level and shout at it in a doctor's waiting room instead of holding it up to their ear, despite the unflattering angle of neck fat tucked loosely under a chin. </bitter>

StrictDabbler 4y ago

You have to admit, though, that it seemed like a dream that the market would ever shift to videophones. New videophones came out every few years in the 80's and 90's and failed, time and again. I saw them in Popular Mechanics, I saw them in Omni Magazine, I saw them in the bargain bin at Circuit City, still overpriced. Why would you buy this thing? What's the point of spending all the extra money on seeing the other person? Chicken and egg, most people don't have one. Won't you have to do your makeup before making a phone call? It didn't occur to many of us that your phone would be your only computer and that it would have two to six cameras so it would be a videophone by default and especially it was hard to believe the phone companies would ever let such functionality be accessed with an ordinary phone number. On its own, the videophone could never have succeeded. It had to be in a convergence device. It also never occurred to me that people would like a videophone so they can hold it at waist level and shout at it in a doctor's waiting room instead of holding it up to their ear, despite the unflattering angle of neck fat tucked loosely under a chin. </bitter>