The history of video conferencing Part 1
The history of video conferencing starts in 1960’s with introduction of AT&T’s Picturephone at the World’s Fair in New York. Sadly, it never became popular because it was too expensive to be practical for most consumers when it was offered for $160 in 1970.
Commercial potential of video conferencing was realized after Ericcson’s demonstration of the first trans-atlantic LME video telephone call. Soon after this other companies began refining video conferencing technologies, including such advancements as network video protocol (NVP) in 1976 and
packet video protocol (PVP) in 1981. However, none of this were put into commercial use and stayed in the laboratory or private company use.
In 1976 video conferencing (VC) between Osaka and Tokyo was established by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. After that a VC running at 48000 bps was estalished between IBM Japan and Uinted States so that they could have weekly meetings.
In 1982 Compression Labs introduces their $250,000 VC system with lines for $1,000 an hour. This system was amazingly huge and used enormous recources capable of tripping 15 amp circiut breakers. But it was the only working VC system available until 1986, when PictureTel’s VC hit the market in 1986 with their substantially cheaper $80,000 system with $100 per hour lines.
In the time between the appearance of this two systems, there were other video conferencing systems developed that were never offered commercially. In 1984, Datapoint was using the Datapoint MINX system on their Texas campus, and had provided the system to the military.
In the late 1980’s, Mitsubishi began selling a still-piture phone that was basically a flop in the marketplace. In 1991 IBM introduced the first PC based video conferencing system - PicTel. The black and white system cost $20,000 with $30 per hour for the lines. In June, 1991, a transcontinental IP
network of over a dozen research sites in the United States and Great Britain using T1 trunks. Today, Dartnet has evolved into CAIRN system, which connects dozens of institutions.