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The Telephone
On March 10, 1876, the telephone was born when Alexander Graham Bell. -
First Transcontinental Telephone Call
Jan. 25, 1915 - If you collect U.S. postage stamps, you might have noticed one issued in February 1998 to commemorate AT&T's 1914 construction of the first transcontinental telephone line. -
First Fax Machine
In 1918 H. Nyquist began investigating ways to adapt telephone circuits for picture transmission. By 1924 this research bore fruit in "telephotography" - AT&T's fax machine. -
First Touch Tone Telephone
The first touch-tone system - which used tones in the voice frequency range rather than pulses generated by rotary dials - was installed in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1941. Operators in a central switching office pushed the buttons; it was much too expensive for general use. However, the Bell System was intrigued by touch-tone because it increased the speed of dialing. -
First Mobile Phone Call
June 17, 1946 - A driver in St. Louis, Mo., pulled out a handset from under his car's dashboard, placed a phone call and made history. It was the first mobile telephone call. -
First Picture Phone
People, it turned out, didn't like Picturephone. The equipment was too bulky, the controls too unfriendly, and the picture too small. But the Bell System was convinced that Picturephone was viable. Trials went on for six more years. In 1970, commercial Picturephone service debuted in downtown Pittsburgh and AT&T executives confidently predicted that a million Picturephone sets would be in use by 1980. -
Cellular Phones
AT&T Labs developed car phones in the 1940s and continued to seek improvements. But until recently mobile telephones were rare, limited by a lack of available communications channels. The big breakthrough came when AT&T Labs divided wireless communications into a series of cells, then automatically switched callers as they moved so that each cell could be reused. This led to the development of cellular phones and made today's mobile communications possible. -
First HDTV
HDTV offers great financial promise to American consumer electronics manufacturers, as it is expected that U.S. consumers will buy nearly eight million HDTV receivers in the first five years of HDTV broadcasting, whenever that may be. -
The computer video phone
The Model 70 was the grandchild of the Picturephone , an AT&T Bell Labs idea-ahead-of-its-time that had bounced around since 1954. People didn't want to be seen on the phone in the 1950s (or the 1960s or the 1970s), but they did seem open to the idea of appearing on their computer screens at work. The Model 70 not only made simultaneous video communication possible, it offered its callers the ability to open, view, and edit files, as well as annotate and write comments on the screen with a mouse -
First "How can I help you" Voice
Customer care systems work best when callers are quickly and accurately routed to support staff. Using Natural Voices technology, AT&T Consumer Services' How May I Help You? (HMIHY) system has significantly improved customer satisfaction by making the machine do the work, instead of you. -
Internet Protection
Security notification and alerting service that detects viruses and worms weeks before they affect a customer's network.
