Long before Zoom, this is what video calling looked like

– [Richard] Get ready to reach out and touch what AT&T bills as the first color motion video phone for the home. Ever wonder what your mother looks like when you explain you are not coming for dinner? Or how about your boss when running late in the morning? You will soon be able to find out. – No matter what you may have heard, we are not changing AT&T’s legal name, to American Telephone and Television Company, (audience laughter) but what we are doing is changing the nature of communications today. – [Richard] Get ready to reach out and touch what AT&T bills as the first color motion video phone for the home. – You guys look great too. – [Richard] As a demonstration, AT&T used actors Robert Wagner and Jill Saint John in Los Angeles to see and talk with daughter Katie in New York. – I think it is definitely the end of blind dating and the beginning of other kind of dating over the phone. (laughter) – [Richard] Shy suitors and anyone else wanting privacy can flip a shutter to block the camera, but some people want AT&T to voluntarily not sell any of the video phones to 900 sex line numbers. – You can just imagine unsupervised children being able to call a 900 number. – [Richard] We’ve been hearing about picture phones since the World’s Fair in the mid 60s, people have been able to see and talk with each other more recently though business teleconferencing. Usage jumped dramatically because of the fear of terrorism during the Gulf War, and the lower cost versus flying. The big difference here in the home: no special equipment. You can plug it in to a standard wall jack. The price of a video phone call will be the same as a regular telephone call, but the device will cost about $1500, and naturally it will take two to talk. The picture though is not the best. Ten frames a second. Kind of like talking to early shuttle astronauts. – The motion is kind of jerky. – [Richard] And if you’ve got 60 TV channels at home, you might even get bored. – Wave. Do something. – [Richard] But techno analysts think it’s a major coo. – The technologies they brought together are like putting all the water from a fire hydrant, fire hose through a garden hose. It’s just amazing to squeeze this much visual information, the sort of thing people need cable TV and TV broadcasters over a normal phone line. – [Richard] The video phone goes on sale in May. What a world we live in. Just think they would have found ET so much faster. Richard Roth, CNN New York.