Picturephone (Mod II)

Closed-circuit TV over three phone lines, with mute, self-view, zoom, height adjustment and a mirror that flips the camera down for desktop document sharing — a technological tour de force for 1970. It cost $250 a month to rent, in 1970 money, and only worked if the other person also paid $250 a month; San Francisco to DC ran $6.50 a minute. AT&T hoped to sell half a million. They placed about 480.

• “It wasn't necessarily the technology, it was just the cost and the fact that society didn't really feel like they had a need for it.”

  Watch at 10:20 ↗Testing Technology That Was Ahead of Its Time

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