We had a Skype session with James and Tabea today. It was kind of weird.
I assume you are familiar with Skype, which was predicted way, way back in the 1920s when radio was barely old enough to stand on its own feet. Before television, before the Internet, before eBay. It didn't really take off due to the bandwidth limitations of the old copper wire; that had to wait a few more years, until optical fiber came into play and it was actually affordable to run those new lines outside of Cincinnati and New York. AT&T did have a few video conference lines in place when the first communications satellites went up in the Fifties and Sixties, but ordinary people couldn't use them. Yet. And things got even more muddled in the Seventies and Eighties when cable came into its own, and the first cell phones came into use, and no one knew if the wired videophone was a dead concept.
But it wasn't. It just needed to have an affordable medium, a network of connections from everyplace to everyplace else. Like the Internet! And as soon as that took off, suddenly there was method to the madness.
So long as you already had an Internet provider. And a high-speed DSL or cable connection. Because passing a video stream over those wires, even a low-bandwidth stream of 320x200 pixels, was impossible over the old-fashioned pre-Internet telephone lines.
But enough of the history less. Skype is here to stay. And since we have a kid in Germany, we're going to figure out how to use it.
Downloading Skype was easy. The hard part was getting the silly webcam to work.
I had an old webcam sitting around the house doing nothing, so we plugged it into Cheryl's laptop. I got another one from the PC recycle place for only $15, and we tested it by calling one another's computers.
It worked.
So now I have my webcam hooked up on Skype. And I can play with it when I get bored.
See?
Sometimes I forget the webcam is on.And I'm sitting at my little desk in the corner of the basement talking on the phone (the regular phone) and suddenly realize that the stupid webcam is on.
Then I feel really stupid.
I assume you are familiar with Skype, which was predicted way, way back in the 1920s when radio was barely old enough to stand on its own feet. Before television, before the Internet, before eBay. It didn't really take off due to the bandwidth limitations of the old copper wire; that had to wait a few more years, until optical fiber came into play and it was actually affordable to run those new lines outside of Cincinnati and New York. AT&T did have a few video conference lines in place when the first communications satellites went up in the Fifties and Sixties, but ordinary people couldn't use them. Yet. And things got even more muddled in the Seventies and Eighties when cable came into its own, and the first cell phones came into use, and no one knew if the wired videophone was a dead concept.
But it wasn't. It just needed to have an affordable medium, a network of connections from everyplace to everyplace else. Like the Internet! And as soon as that took off, suddenly there was method to the madness.
So long as you already had an Internet provider. And a high-speed DSL or cable connection. Because passing a video stream over those wires, even a low-bandwidth stream of 320x200 pixels, was impossible over the old-fashioned pre-Internet telephone lines.
But enough of the history less. Skype is here to stay. And since we have a kid in Germany, we're going to figure out how to use it.
Downloading Skype was easy. The hard part was getting the silly webcam to work.
I had an old webcam sitting around the house doing nothing, so we plugged it into Cheryl's laptop. I got another one from the PC recycle place for only $15, and we tested it by calling one another's computers.
It worked.
So now I have my webcam hooked up on Skype. And I can play with it when I get bored.
See?
Sometimes I forget the webcam is on.And I'm sitting at my little desk in the corner of the basement talking on the phone (the regular phone) and suddenly realize that the stupid webcam is on.
Then I feel really stupid.
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