[Lex Computer & Tech Group/LCTG] THIS IS COOL ... (but not real)

[Paul Garmon]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 11:32 PM George Gamota <ggamota at stma-llc.com> wrote:

> Other crazy ideas, a universal translator or video phone. Only in sci-fi
> movies
>

The movies are good.  Sometimes reality is wilder (like right now)?

Related: a favorite is reading (laughing at?) auto-transcribed (I think?)
captions from work meetings using Google Hangouts.

I was at the 1964 World's Fair <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdWnrjCcDWI>
and was fascinated by the rather black and white, small video telephone:

   - AT&T BELL LABS PICTUREPHONE PROMO FILM VIDEOPHONE SERVICE
   <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqb1o8up_Fw>


Took a while to get it into your pocket (and have the pictures move!).  I
was part of video compression history in the early 1990s, having helped
pioneer the (software side of the) early JPEG hardware codecs
<http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/c-cube-microsystems-inc-history/>
for editing 30FPS video.  Got pretty darn hot (i.e. burn your finger if you
touched it), but we did not put a heat sink on it, as the package was
ceramic.  HUGE die size for a chip (so much for using auto-layout
software!) made the yield relatively low.  I think these cost about
$400/ea. when we started.

[image: P1030382.JPG]

Now, you can do much of this in software on CPUs (but GPU
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit>s are still
thousands of times faster).

Paul
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