Это видео недоступно.
Сожалеем об этом.
Video Calling in 1992!? - AT&T VideoPhone 2500 (Unboxing & Retrospective)
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 6 дек 2020
- ● Liked this video? Subscribe for more: mjd.yt/subscribe
Nowadays, video calling is apart of everyday life. But back in 1992, it was just a futuristic concept. And AT&T attempted to make it a reality with the VideoPhone 2500. But due to its high price and limited usage, it didn't sell very well and was discontinued a few years afterwords. Today we travel back to the early '90s and explore this incredibly interesting piece of telecommunications history!
More Retrospectives: • Retrospectives/Documen...
● Gear I use to make these videos: www.kit.co/mjd
Camera: amzn.to/2K5ia3D
Tripod (mine is discontinued): amzn.to/2IcI6YM
Smaller Tripod: amzn.to/2UfLAk9
Microphone: amzn.to/2XrmZdb
Editing Software (Premiere): amzn.to/2uKtrvN
Thumbnail Editor (Photoshop): amzn.to/2WRxvqj
● Affiliate Links (these links will earn me a commission if you purchase something though them at no additional cost to you):
Get a FREE 30-DAY TRIAL of Amazon Prime: amzn.to/2xVmMB3
Get 2 FREE Audiobooks with Audible: amzn.to/2Ovylse
Try Twitch Prime for FREE: amzn.to/33g6vaa
Amazon: www.amazon.com...
● Follow Me:
Twitter: / mjdtweets
Instagram: / mjdmichael
● Music/Credits:
Title: Wonky West Coast
Artist: DivKid
Source: RUclips Audio Library
Title: Hanging Out
Artist: Bruno E.
Source: RUclips Audio Library
Title: Rest
Artist: Otis McDonald
Source: RUclips Audio Library
Title: Bittersweet
Artist: SYBS
Source: RUclips Audio Library
Images Used (under Creative Commons or Public Domain):
en.wikipedia.o...
en.wikipedia.o...
commons.wikime...
en.wikipedia.o...
www.vintagecomp...
en.wikipedia.o...
commons.wikime...
commons.wikime...
commons.wikime...
www.flickr.com...
www.flickr.com...
www.earlytelevi...
pixabay.com/vi...
www.flickr.com...
www.flickr.com...
commons.wikime...
www.flickr.com...
Info Sources:
time.com/58345...
mashable.com/2...
techchannel.at...
www.engadget.c...
creative.nydail...
www.history.co...
www.prnewswire...
Amazon Affiliate Notice: I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. All Amazon links that I provide will use my affiliate code with Amazon.
Some materials in this video are used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which allows "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, and research.
#MichaelMJD #VideoPhone #Retrospective
Dad worked for AT&T Bell Labs back then and we got to use this once to talk with him when he was on a trip to Japan. Had that “Vogons intergalactic demolition team contacting earth” kinda video quality. My mom instantly hated it “I don’t want people to see me when I call them”
I and one other engineer developed the dual up modem for this device. It had a proprietary modem, speech coder, video coder, and protocol stack, which made several three letter acronym organizations in Washington very nervous.
Wow
@@dspmandavid generally anything that makes them nervous, is a good thing
@@dspmandavid what was the modem speed on these things ?
i wouldve thought that for video to work back then , both sides would need to be on ISDN or higher
4
My grandfather worked for At&t when this was introduced, he was so freaking proud of this thing.
Väl sagt håkan
As well he should have been!
wow
based
I never knew this was such a thing in the early 1990s! Good job!
The 80s and 90s scifi was riddled with stuff like this.
@@MrKillswitch88 the prototype for this phone was used in gremlins 2. I think it was crt, I don't think it went on sale.
Me to
depends on your age ...i remember the at&t commercial that briefly showed this concept i was 9
Some
"Do people still use Skype?"
I live with these madmen and women actually
No! I refuse to accept that Skype is dying !
Microsoft basically ruined it..
I'll take Skype over Zoom, Duo, and even Teams any day of the week. However Discord is my goto for everything now
What's wrong with Skype? It's decent for what it is, not better or worse than your basic video calling solution.
@@a4andrei I didn't say there was anything wrong with it
Oh hey, you can call Techmoan. He has a BT variant of this.
I do want to see a collab with this, granted probably impossible given landlines are on their way out.
Ain't gonna happen, as MJD doesn't have a landline... Techmoan does, but MJD does not...
@@slashtiger1 it’s a shame he doesn’t even have a voip line. I reckon that might work, as I can send a fax on mine.
@@griffster17 Dunno if a VoIP line would do the trick. I know you can send faxes over them, even do Dial-up Networking, but that's because these services share an important characteristic with regular voice calls. They use roughly the same bandwidth and frequency range. I don't know if that would hold true for this type of video call, as it basically coexists with a regular voice call and may well need additional bandwidth, which is not often properly supported by VoIP networks.
@@slashtiger1 yeah well the problem is of course, that he doesn’t even have one of those. So we’ll never know.
That is straight up crazy. I just can't believe that tech like this existed on a consumer market 30 years ago. Like, I got my first web cam on my PC in 2007 or so.
I know man! Just imagine the technology that they really have now that they are hiding from us!
bruh, adult cams existed in 1996, it was even in an old internet documentary from back then
My Great Grandchild in the far far future: “ You guys had phones and internet outside of your brain?”
Me: “Yup.”
The Simpsons episode looking into the future. Homer gets a computer virus from a suspicious B-mail and his brain stalls.
We just got confirmation that Michael has a shoulder, so he's not only some floating hands, hooray!
i never knew that!
is a hoax! do not be fooled!
@@xxalex423xx is a hoax
@@xxalex423xx r/whooooshed
@@Yellowpick10 he was joking lol
Something like this would be handy for people like my grandma who don’t even have a PC, let alone Internet access. Unfortunately the only way it would be even remotely useful today would be if it could somehow connect to modern Internet video conferences, assuming that’s even possible.
The connection is easy, finding a device that screams the same language would be the challenge.
What about a modern smartphone with an extremely watered-down interface?
Try with a voice over IP telephone
My grandad got a new pc with Windows 10 i use his old one
@@EweToobUsername like a samsing a01 with extreme power saving mode on 24/7 super basic and easy, stress free use.
I'm a simple man. I see a video from Michael, I click.
Click me to
Alright lets get Doom running on this thing!
2 days later:
DOOM on the AT&T VideoPhone 2500
@@ricky2k3_ uP
Yeah just dial numbers and have game controllers plugged in somehow and there you go.
Clint would be on that so fast
He cant even make a video call on this thing....
I just wish that the Phone's Ringer would've been like: "Ring-Ring-Ring!, Ring-Ring-Ring!, Phone Call!, Phone Call!"
Oh hey it's Michael
Lol I love the pokemon reference
10 FPS in Minecraft: My computer's crap.
10 FPS in VideoPhone: This is fine.bmp
Meanwhile almost every animated cartoon you've ever seen is animated at 12 or 15 FPS and no one complains that they want smoother South Park.
Fun fact, technology and algorithms developed for this product, others like it, and it's recent predecessors (the Discrete Cosine Transform, DCT) eventually evolved into the h26x compression standards that are still widely used for lossy compression of video today. So in a way, the video you're watching is using a direct decendant of this tech, but one-way.
how did you acquire this info
You are totally correct. The video was DCT and the voice coder was was state of the art CELP, very similar to the first digital cell phones. The modem was the fastest we could do at the time at 19.2 kbps. It had a slower modem of 16.8 for undersea cable channels with tighter bandwidth.
I love how the wallpaper matches the timeperiod of that phone. Those little details are amazing!
Oh i remember that AT&T box design. They used it for EVERYTHING. We had a AT&T phone/answering machine combo back in 1992/1993 and the box was identical to this one. I would see it whenever i went downstairs to get a board game because my parents would save the box for everything they bought.
I have a friend that in the late 90s went to military high school in the us. We’re from Venezuela. His father is very very rich and back then he bought 2 videophones so he could see his son over the phone.
I thought it’s was amazing. I will ask them if they still have them.
The same problem was present with early 3g cellphones with video call capabilities. They had a front camera and 3G connectivity for smooth video, but you needed someone who had the same kind of cellphone. They were still expensive.
Video calling was just not ready yet. Only recently has video calling become a viable option.
3G connectivity was still not really fast enough for full-motion video, so the experience was not 100%. 4G made for better quality, and now 5G with ultra wideband is even faster
That is wireless, though, for the best possible experience, wired connections are where it's at. FIBER!!
*pulls out old 9v*
Me: "touch it to your tounge see if its good"
Me: "Oh, $16/3 minutes for something like that doesnt seem too bad, especially back then--"
MichaelMJD: "Thats $134/3 minutes in 2020"
I think there was a Dilbert comic where Dilbert bought one, and Dogbert ridiculed him for it because no one else had one to use it.
id love to see it if anyone can find it
These old "Video Phones", somehow remind me of the ones in the Pokemon Series
Pokemon Series
@@ADeeSHUPA ?
@@robertsteel3563 Video Phones
@@ADeeSHUPA ?
@TrollinStupid ?
:P
I remember seeing one of these set up at the AT&T shop at the local mall. It was pointed put to me that it was only updating the parts of the picture where there was movement instead of redrawing the entire frams.
Me too! They were quite the store. I was wondering if anyone else remembered them.
It something similar to MPEG-2 video compression.
My dad was an engineer at at&t. He worked on telephone switches, not video phones, but he had an eye for this kind of thing.
I worked for a company that tried some kind of "technological revolution" in their offices in the early 90s. There were piles of these, video projectors, Apple Newtons, RF wireless keyboards and mice, and a bunch of these generic pre-win95 multimedia kits in a storage bin, all boxed.
There was a legend in the IT department. The company owner ( at the time) was a severe cocaine addict. During one of his binges, he hired some random dude to upgrade the place to be ready for the 21st century. The guy spent like $200k on tech. Then the boss came down from his bender, and got angry because he essentially lost his yearly bonus. The random dude got fired, and then they got all this stuff and didn't know what to do with it. Apparently they couldn't return anything? I dunno. It was a lot of stuff. I bet they still have all of it.
Funny enough, I was browsing Techmoan's videos and bumped into the same topic. Buy I'm not complaining, 1 obscure topic by 2 of the best youtubers.
i remember seeing this on the tv show home improvement
Arruughh!
Yeah! Harry's son was a telephone installer and they used one to talk to Al or something
We almost had a face reveal.
i kinda want his face if hw ever reveals it
@@harshnemesis Why are you so disrespectful? Jesus, some people just have deep voices, no reason to be nasty.
@Klarue Playz 71
@@mousecursor6521 82
@@NuclearMoonCat he has a deep voice?
In 1927, AT&T was experimenting with the concept of video calls. In 2021, they can't even give me cell service in Walmart 😐
I'm the perfect age where as a kid, video calling was not a thing. And even as a 6 year old, I understood it was a TON of information for a computer to transfer. When a few years later, facetime came along, I was mystified and thought it was witchcraft. Nowadays I'm an app developer and have made a video calling app. Makes a nice loop 😆
😳
"Do people still use skype"
Philippines quarantine education system on the corner who is using messenger:
You'd be surprised that in our school we use Discord, Zoom (coz boomers) and Google Hangout.
Lies.
That intro is like no other!
Keep up the great work!
Thanks so much! I appreciate it
Really cool collector's item. Thanks for the vid, Michael!
Wow , Techmoan covered bigger version of this , and has pair of two of these , intended for home use , but , screens / cameras are dead. So , no their demo. I'm writing this ahead of actual video , so , I don't know does this work either. :)
Edit:
I forgot to mention that to operate it , you needed ISDN phone line (dual , if possible) that had 64kb speed or 128kb speed (dual) , but such line was outrageously expensive in early 90's , if not through entire 90's , my uncle worked for telecom company back then , and he called businesses and people who had ISDN - insane , so , I guess it was even more expensive than I thought it was. :)
Hi, in Australia i had 56k dial up until early 90's, ISDN did exist but it was mainly for businesses that jumped on the technology and then realized that ISDN is really - Is Something Dont Need - 64k each way
I think around 2000-2005 my dial up switched to ISDN 64k and later to 128k, it was upgraded possibly @ 2010 to ADSL2
It reminds me of the first people who got a fax machine, they had no one they knew to send anything to
Regards
George
Very nice. We have a pair of these hooked up at the Connections Museum in Seattle and it's one of my favorite things to show people during tours, especially kids. Unfortunately the backlight has gone out in one of our sets but they still work fine. One thing you can't experience without actually making a call is the lag. The phone digitized the signal in video mode using a modem and you can hear the audio lag it introduces since our phones are only a few yards/meters apart. It's quite noticeable going from the crisp analog audio to the delayed and compressed sound when you connect the video.
If you want to hook this or other old phones up for demo look for a small hybrid PBX system. You can find used (or some new ones) for pretty cheap, especially as companies retire older phone systems. One I would recommend is the Panasonic KX-TA824, it's a compact but very flexible unit
"In the late 1870s"
God damn I didn't expect that.
Ooh, this is sort of like that thing Techmoan showed off a while ago!
@KannaSan it's also fascinating how thestuff of science fiction is now just around except most of the time we use old fashioned calls because after the novelty has worn off it's often more of an inconvenience...
They should call each other on them
Technically Video calling is one of the few future technologies The Jetsons fairly accurately predicted. Right down to it largely being used for Work.
No, they dont use skype. they do use Microsoft Teams
Nah Skype still g
Skype still works
"Do people still use skype?"
me who uses it daily to talk to friends and family: *yup*
I was on the development team for this device. I and one other engineer developed the dial modem, which was proprietary at 19.2 kbps for domestic calls and 16.8 kbps for international. The speech coder, video coder and protocol stack were also new and proprietary. Our boss was asked to come to Washington, DC to provide some details, because all of the customs new tech made the three letter acronym organizations very nervous, as it was effectively secure.
Despite what is started in the video, they were intended to be sold in pairs at about $1700.00 per pair. The target market was grandparents who would send one of the two units to their grandchildren. The beta test market was Boca Raton, Florida. As you might expect, unfortunately the most popular market became porn.
Michael, you sound more and more excited with each video, a huge change from your monotone voice a couple of years ago. Keep it up :)
I love these weird and wacky things you review keep it up!
Wow! I didn't know that video calling existed even in the 90's! I thought that the concept only started in the late 90's-early 2000's! It's so amazing!
Funny part is in 1992, most of the people used rotary phones to make calls.
That's quite a statement to make... and honestly, I don't think it holds true. Not in my experience anyway. Of course, quite a few rotary phones were still in use, those things were durable to be sure, but were many of those still being manufactured, and was that what MOST people had at home or used at the office? I seriously doubt it and don't remember that being the case.
@@BilisNegra In Europe were still in use at that time, off course were landline phones with keypad, but was a lot of people which are still used rotary phones purchased in the 1960s and 1970s. In my experiece my grandparents used rotary phones even after year 2000.
In 1992, I went to live in Germany. As an American who had used touch-tone from an early age (but who knew how to use rotary phones), I was surprised to see that Germany had only pulse service back then.
It seems to have taken mobile phone adoption to modernize this part of the signaling...
You would be surprised to know in India (where I live) and other poorly developed countries we still use landline to make calls.
By the late 70s, at least in the States, though some people still had rotary phones, touchtone phones were commonplace. My household got them in 1973.
The biggest surprise is that it's in color. I bet if they went with like 16 shade grayscale the framerate would have been alot better due to having more bits availible, so it would actually be somewhat useful
I never could imagine where the technology will go us. But for sure i would to use this phone today bc.. look how fancy and cool it is!!
Great video as always! I find it very interesting that this concept dates all the way back to the 1920s. Just goes to show how far technology has came!
Great video Michael interesting to see what video calling was like before Zoom And Skype and FaceTime etc
I worked at an AT&T Phone center back in 1992. We had these in stock and for sale. We never sold a single unit. I remember during Desert Storm we had "free video calls" set up in our stores so soldiers could video call with their families overseas. Also, just for fun we would video call with other AT&T phone centers. The novelty wore off quickly. The picture quality was horrible. Blurry, grainy, dark, and extremely laggy. It felt like a series still photos flashing on the tiny screen.
this is what it feels like facetiming on at&t anyways lol
I like how there is a slash on the lens when the shutter is closed. A lot of laptops have a shutter today, but it can be hard to tell if it is closed.
This video really shows what you do and the type of videos you make. Great video Michael MJD!
I remember using a similar device in Germany in 93 or 94, but it used ISDN instead of an analog line.
As you probably know an ISDN line in Europe had 2 channels of 64 kbit/s each, so you could log into a bbs and make a phone call at the same time.
ISDN video phones used both channels at the same time, 128kbit/s. Much more bandwidth than these analog video phones that only had a 28.8k modem in them. The video was quite usable 176x144 (QCIF) at a constant 15 FPS.
Obviously few people used such phones. You needed the phone and ISDN service and a video call was twice as expensive as a voice call because you had to pay for both channels.
Later you could turn a PC with a TV card, a camera and an ISDN card into a compatible video phone using special software.
That device has a state of the art 19.2 kbps modem in it, which was well before 28.8.
Everybody gangsta until the teacher's camera becomes VideoPhone 2500.
Amazing, keep the videos up!
Thanks, will do! : )
I used to know someone who owned this.
Michael keep up the great work
"But somebody bought this one and left it in its package for the past almost 3 decades."
I'm honestly wondering what he was thinking. Like why he bought it and never actually used it... Only to resell it at a huge loss.
I remember seeing something like this on Home Improvement in the 90s and then never again.
0:58 Is this you Michael??? Love the video!!
Great video! I still remember doing NetMeeting calls over 56k dial-up modems. Probably about the same resolution/framerate as that phone at that bandwidth. Too bad NetMeeting no longer exists. It was nice having the option to do video calls over a point-to-point connection (pretty good over LANs) that didn't require being connected to a server.
Epic video
I love that the aesthetic of a power supply is that it looks like a phone on a receiver
There were video phones and video calling in France around from 1984. It was quite popular.
Epic new video ;D
Michael: speaks normal English
RUclips auto captions: nice Vietnamese bro
It's too bad you don't have a telephone line. I own a ATT video phone and would like to experience it sometime. But so far you're the only person I know who has one.
Fun Fact: The Inventor of the First Two Way Video Phone is Gregorio Y. Zara. A Filipino Engineer studied in University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute Of Technology in the United States And University of Paris in France
I know Action Retro was able to use the bluetooth from his phone with an adapter, no idea if that would work though
Your video editing and speaking is amazing! I wish you the best of luck!
I remember when in 1997 the TV show Home Improvement tried to advertise this phone I'm assuming for AT&T, well past 1992. If my memory is right, it was actually the 2500 on that episode as well. I originally thought they were using the actual device, but upon finding some RUclips videos, it was simulated. But possibly simulated by someone who actually tried it first, as they simulated the low framerate rather well, just a touch faster for TV use.
I remember seeing a demo of this unit at the mall in the early 90s. Was always interested in the tech.
The tiny screen alone would have blown my mind back then
There was an episode of The Simpsons where Mr. Smithers looked for a job at AT&T. The sign actually says "NeAT&Tidy Piano Movers".
It would've been awesome if you made a call with another Videophone owner. Maybe a neighbor would've been willing to let you make a call.
I was disappointed that didn't have phone service or another phone to actually demonstrate it working. It would be like showing a laptop and saying "This is the keyboard where you would type something and it would compute it on the screen. I don't have an operating system installed so I can't actually show you this though". It's a really cool piece of tech and I wonder if it would even work with "modern" home phone lines.
200$??? Holy $h!t!!
That's not holy $hit 1000 is
Thank these engineers for making something that we use today. And thank you Michael MJD for taking about this. It's very interesting.
Please, someone show up in comment section who has this device! I want to see how a video chat would be in 2020 with this thing!
Exactly.
This phone reminds me of the video phone in the first Total Recall lol
See the bumpy, textured matte black finish on the plastic and the notched edges on the sides? A lot of tech in the 90's and 2000's had that, I really miss it. Everything now is smooth and flat.
When I was a kid I saw one of these in real life in 1996 at the Westin Mission Hills Resort in Rancho Mirage CA. They had a bunch in the lobby.
My family had one , we had no one else to talk too cause we were the only ones lol
This is the closest we're going to get to a Michael MJD face reveal, we got to see a little bit of head.
I actually still have one of these in my house 😳😂😅
I just LOVE 80s and 90s tech. Greetings from Poland :)
Yes, of course people still use Skype!
ONLY Grandparents.
The new skype logo is yuck. Microsoft shouldn't be changing the logos. Btw, it's actually cool 😃
im a great grandparent if i use wlm
this reminds me of Back to the future part 2 when marty gets fired
Remember those old AT&T commercials where they pretty much predicted the entire future? Yup, this was part of it.
Landline phones are still very good because calling with them is not so expensive like simcard smartphone calling
Back then though a tiny 10fps screen like that still would have been amazing to see and use
I remember using one of these for a contest I was a contestant on with Nickelodeon back around this time. I received the video phone a few days before my scheduled game time, got to set it up, and tested it with them. Got to play on live tv while seeing a very pixelated video of myself, and then the next day got to send it to the next contestant. In all it was a cool experience since we were able to transmit a video of myself live over the telephone wires and was able to see myself on the tv, but this is nothing anything close to the technology of today.
You should have bought two, and had a regular telephone line, to do a complete demonstration.
This is so ahead of its time 👍
Gregorio Y. Zara (8 March 1902 - 15 October 1978) was a Filipino engineer and physicist best remembered for inventing the first two-way video telephone. Zara’s video telephone invention enabled the caller and recipient to see each other while conversing, laying the foundation for video-conferencing. Zara was an outstanding student who graduated valedictorian in elementary and high school before obtaining a scholarship to study mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He went on to graduate with highest distinction in aeronautical engineering and physics from the University of Michigan and the University of Paris, respectively. Zara held 30 patents for devices and equipment. Other notable creations include an induction compass used by pilots for direction, a solar-powered water heater and an alcohol-fuelled aeroplane engine. Zara also discovered a law of electrical kinetic resistance known as the Zara effect.
I've never known this, but this phone is such an unbelievable work in the early 1990s, when I wasn't born.
Strange enough, my GRANDPARENTS had this phone back then!! My grandfather was a higher up at Del Monte and used it to video conference with other suits from home so he would neither have to go to the office, or, in some cases, not have to visit the fields at farms.
He also had a fax machine before those became common. Between him and my aunt, who still works at Lawrence Livermore Lab, I’ve been exposed to VERY advanced tech since I was little, before the public at large saw them.
7:34 Amazing Music!
i was seeing this in a computer chronicles episode from 1993 lo and behold you got one of these
Wow, I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid. We had one in Indiana and my aunt and grandma had one in Ohio. I can confirm the video quality sucked, but at that time it was amazing (for like the first couple of calls). 😂
I remeber seeing something like this at the time in an advertisement and then was like...."What happened" we never got to be the JETSONS???