all abandoned.

This was one of my favorite stores in the mall when it still existed. Being a phone phreak, there was nothing like seeing the live demo of the AT&T VideoPhone 2500. I distinctly remember this as an early lesson on the difference between marketing bullshit and real-life product performance. In the television advertisements, AT&T depicted relatively clear, smooth video. However, the VideoPhone 2500 was specifically designed to work over POTS (plain old telephone service) lines, which had only 56kbps of bandwidth, so the VideoPhone 2500 typically managed only 1 frame per second, and it was readily apparent when seeing the phone in person. Needless to say, we didn't buy one for our house, and at $1500 a piece, only 30,000 people globally did. Factor in that you, and your called party, needed to have the exact same phone, and it's no surprise that these didn't catch on.

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