Since March 2020, many office workers rarely go a day without hopping on a quick Zoom or Teams call. However, back on May 30, 1996, when Intel announced its new PC-based videophone, few could imagine a day in the future when videoconferencing would be the norm. Learn how we got here in this edition of Tech Time Warp.
Intel’s 1996 videophone flopped, but saw the future
The Intel Video Phone with ProShare technology promised to deliver “quality video communications over ordinary telephone lines,” according to the 1996 Intel annual report. (“Show grandma the kids’ latest artwork—over the phone.”) Despite some high-dollar marketing efforts featuring Seinfeld’s own Jason Alexander, this 1990s foray into the future did not take off. Perhaps the issue was cost. The $200 retail price equates to just over $409 in today’s dollars, which wasn’t inexpensive for a technology few others had. And using the Intel videophone was not a seamless process. First, you had to answer or make a call on your regular phone, and then you had to add video on a home computer using the same line. Your computer needed to have an advanced processor for the time (a 133-MHz Pentium processor, then just entering the marketplace) as well as an uncommon ISDN line.
The Intel videophone didn’t take off, and neither did AT&T’s early 1990s Videophone 2500. An April 13, 2000, piece in The New York Times quoted historians who said videophones were the “most famous failure in the history of the Bell system” and that “it turned out that it wasn’t entirely clear that people wanted to be seen on a telephone.” One prognosticator, though, had it right. Iowa State University professor Alan I. Marcus told the Times: “I think we are getting close to creating a demand for it. And someday we’ll think about the old days when we couldn’t see each other while we were talking.” Next time you begrudgingly turn your camera on, think about this.
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