Roughly 25 years ago, I spent a little while at INESC and its little coterie of incubated companies (what we’d term “startups” these

25 Years Of Video Calls

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Style Pass

2021-07-25 21:30:04

Roughly 25 years ago, I spent a little while at INESC and its little coterie of incubated companies (what we’d term “startups” these days) doing all manner of things I think are worth recounting.

One of the reasons I got into the telco universe was an internship project I did for EURESCOM at the (now defunct) CPRM Marconi, and which I later picked up again at INESC. It was an international project with people from BT, Deutsche Telekom and a few other (now termed incumbent) telcos focusing on CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work).

More to the point, we tested H.323/T.120 compliant video conferencing and screen sharing software, drawing diagrams in a cross-platform canvas between Microsoft NetMeeting and some ugly Motif application on Sun boxes, and generally trying to figure out what the future would look like in the typically weird and over-complicated way telco standards bodies looked at the world.

In a weird precursor to this bright, amazing future we all now live in, I had a PC decked out with an Intel video capture card, a camera and a VGA monitor into which we tried to cram NetMeeting, a few video thumbnails, a whiteboard and some document to “collaborate” on.