He sits in front of his screens, on each screen - on the snout, or even two, and he talks with all these snouts. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, "The Boy from the Underworld"

The Strugatsky book of 1973 describes the future of our planet. Very far away. The authors did not assume that at least in the field of video conferencing it will come much earlier. With a slander on the screen, or even two, now you are not particularly surprised. Surprisingly, VCS has almost a century of history.

Once upon a time

In 1925, the American telephone monopolist AT & T created its research division - Bell Laboratories. It was there that the attempts to create a videophone began, the first of which was demonstrated on April 7, 1927. On this day, a video call from Washington to New York took place; the video, however, was one-way. The conversation was attended by the head of the Ministry of Commerce Herbert Hoover (right) and the president of AT & T Walter Gifford (left).

Remarkably, the image was formed mechanically - the cathode ray tube has not yet gained confidence.

Sex, drugs, rock and roll

Together with these three things the videophone returns to the world. By 1950, AT & T's technological potential had grown strongly: transistors were invented, automatic telephone exchanges were developed and implemented, a mobile communication service was launched, and a network of television broadcasting was being developed. In 1956, a working prototype of a “picture-background” was created, a device capable of transmitting images of speaking to each other at a frequency of 2 frames per second. The picture-background required three telephone lines for its work: one for video transmission, the second for receiving video, and the third for voice and connection initialization.
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After a series of improvements on the New York World's Fair 1964, the commercial version of the picture-background "Mod 1" was presented. At the same time, the commercial operation of the service began in New York, Washington and Chicago. A call to New York-Washington cost $ 16, and New York-Chicago $ 27 for three minutes.

AT & T was expecting the widespread introduction of videophones by the mid-1980s with a million subscribers and a total turnover of $ 5 billion. The development of second-generation picture-backgrounds with a variofocal lens, which never went on sale, began in 1973. AT & T turned off the operation of picture-backgrounds.

During this time, the general was replaced by president

For a couple of decades, videophones lived only in laboratories and science fiction films. There were several attempts to launch commercial videoconferencing operations, but only one can be called successful: in 1982, the Japanese division of IBM created a videoconferencing system that was used at weekly corporate meetings. Commercial failures are primarily due to the price of equipment and the cost of connection. The subscriber videoconference device of the 1980s cost more than $ 80,000, and the communication hour cost no less than $ 100. And the dollar in those days was not what it is now.

Actually in the 1990s, the rapid development of video conferencing began: videophones appeared with an adequate price (only $ 1500), the first software solutions for PCs were developed, the H.323 protocol was standardized, and packet transmission was gaining momentum. Video conferencing has become color and accessible.

But this is the newest story that everyone knows.