Reading a book on Bell Labs -- fascinating to see they launched a video telephone service (zoom but in a square box) all the way back in 1969 predicting it'd "lessen the need for in-person meetings".

It flopped then but 50 years later zoom finally took the concept to mass market

Tech entrepreneur. Founder @electricsql. Founder @gatsbyjs (acquired by Netlify). @kylemathews on Twitter

The book was written pre-zoom and amusingly still mostly dismisses the idea of video chatting 🤣

Now we'd easily categorize it as Network Effect Cold Start Problem but the world has very few networks at the time so the at&t executives didn't seem to realize what they needed to do

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The Idea Factory

Very envious of those that got to work there!

The creativity space they were given! What's the book, our book club needs a new read and my co-host is a bell labs nerd.

Designer, among other things. Learning backend dev. @astralwave on the bird app

And going back a decade or more you can see the concept in science fiction books.

In Asimov’s Naked Sun, it was futuristic for people to “view” each other as some kind of 3D holographic projection instead of “seeing” each other.

It’s still futuristic today! We’re only at goggles VR, no 3D holographs yet