Picturephone at the 1964 NY World's Fair [telecom]

"When they showed off their cutting-edge invention to awed audiences at the World's Fair in 1964, the creators of the Picturephone had the future both completely wrong and completely right.

Designers from the Bell System were mistaken that the unveiling of the gadget, which transmitted a picture image along with a phone call to a small monitor, allowing two callers to see and chat with each other, would instantaneously revolutionize communication, the way the first telephone call had nearly a century before.

Though three public call centers were set up in Chicago, Washington D.C., and Grand Central Station in New York City, the phone systems never took off. At around $27 for a three-minute call between Chicago and New York (about $200 in today's dollars), they were far too expensive for practical use."

for full article, which includes photos and other introductions (eg the Mustang), please see:

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[moderator pro tem's note: I have heard said that the real application they had in mind for Picturephone was remote computing. The idea of a low-cost video terminal was unthinkable to the Bell Labs boffins. Instead they imagined that shared video logic would best be displayed by remote screens. Boy were they wrong... -fg]