PicturePhone: How Bell Telephone lost a half billion, but nearly created the internet
How Bell Telephone's PicturePhone, introduced in 1964, flopped yet nearly catalyzed the internet. Technically, it was an amazing achievement: Bell used the existing twisted-pair copper wire of the telephone network -- not broadband lines like today - to produce black and white video on a screen about five inches square. And, amazingly for the time, it used a CCD-based-camera.
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If this got popular who knows how much ahead we would have been in communications technology.
$1000 a month = guaranteed fail
Ultra luxury that very few could afford. Recipe for disaster.
Took 50 years to get it right.