As one of the predecessors to Hackaday, Popular Electronics magazine would regularly feature projects for keen electronics fans to build at home.
One such project from the pages of Radio Electronics in 1982 was a ‘picture phone’, which while using the same closed-circuit TV camera and TV technology of the time, transmitted a still image once every eight seconds using slow scan TV (SSTV) techniques, and despite the low frame rate and low resolution, was considered high tech at the time.
SSTV was being experimenting with by ham radio enthusiasts as early as the 1960s, and the 1982 device improved on this by using digital memory to capture and convert the slow scan input to a standard TV signal.
Despite the Picture Phone never being commercialised, it laid the groundwork for the video phones we enjoy today, while progress in cameras, networks, and displays have now brought us full motion video calling.
