Tag Archives: VNC

Five years before the iPhone

Trying to organise some of my old video footage recently, I came across a little demo I recorded of the AT&T Broadband Phone, a project we started in 1999 but which, sadly, died, along with the research lab that had created it, in 2002.

Looking back at it now, I notice how slow-paced it is compared to the typical YouTube video of today!  So if you watch it, you might need a little patience!  Nonetheless, it’s quite fun to see some of the ideas we were considering back then, five or six years before the launch of the iPhone… things like the suggestion that streamed music “might be a service offered by a record company, where you pay a small amount for each track”, for example…

 

Cordless Broadband phone and iPhone comparison

Direct link.

 

(P.S. I had an idea I had written about this here before… and indeed discovered that I had… but not since 2008, about eighteen months after the iPhone was launched.) 

“If you’ve got a browser connected to the Internet, I can show you…”

For the sake of posterity, I’ve uploaded the original VNC video that we made back in 1998.

Lots of nostalgia in here – remember the JavaStation? The WebTV? And the days when we made movies in 4:3 ratios?

A great deal has changed in the last 16 years, but VNC goes from strength to strength!

Starring, in order of appearance:

  • Quentin Stafford-Fraser
  • Andy Harter
  • Ken Wood
  • Tristan Richardson
  • Paul Webster
  • Frazer Bennett
  • James Weatherall
  • Daisy Sadleir

Also available on YouTube. Thanks to Andy Fisher for doing the original transfer from VHS to DVD some years ago.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser