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

[George Gamota]

I came to Bell Labs in 1967 and played with the video phone as management tried to figure out how and to whom market it. Sadly they concluded after many trials that WOMEN would not buy it since they would be concerned in how they looked answering the phone whereas you pick up a regular phone and nobody knows how you look.

Fast forward today, a few funny videos as people ZOOM, scratch their noses, walk out to visit what looks like a bathroom and even hearing it flush. I guess people don’t realize that they open their living room for all to see - 😊

 

From: LCTG <lctg-bounces+ggamota=stma-llc.com at lists.toku.us> On Behalf Of Paul Garmon
Sent: Monday, June 8, 2020 11:57 PM
To: Lex Computer Group <lctg at lists.toku.us>
Subject: Re: [Lex Computer & Tech Group/LCTG] THIS IS COOL ... (but not real)

 

On Mon, Jun 8, 2020 at 11:32 PM George Gamota <ggamota at stma-llc.com <mailto: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 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqb1o8up_Fw> &T BELL LABS PICTUREPHONE PROMO FILM VIDEOPHONE SERVICE

 

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.

 



 

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

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.toku.us/private.cgi/lctg-toku.us/attachments/20200609/2935323e/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image003.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 33756 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.toku.us/private.cgi/lctg-toku.us/attachments/20200609/2935323e/attachment.jpg>