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The Broadband Phone (2021)

I started the Broadband Phone project in early 1999, with Andy Fisher. That was great fun! It was fast-moving, became high-profile within AT&T, and got lots of attention.

There was a server - an ordinary Dell PC also running Linux - which was the SIP proxy and also provided all the pixels for the user interface. And we wanted the graphics to be really snappy, so we created a GUI toolkit where all of the widgets knew how to render themselves directly into VNC; they generally never went via a conventional framebuffer. There was a significant effort to spin this project off as a new company called Telescopix but, sadly, this was 2001, and creating technology startups had suddenly become exceedingly difficult!

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