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"Cyberpunk worked when the Internet was in its hand-wound crystal radio phase, when you had to be a sort of hobbyist to do e-mail, and it all had a very steep learning curve. Those days are over."
- William Gibson
 |
| Optophone (Opto) | ||
| A video call system. |
Unique name for a videophone, lost to history.
| "Miss Henderson has resigned, Mr. Conover." The voice of his chief clerk spoke from the optophone, simultaneously with the appearance of that individual's alert features in its disc. |
| Technovelgy from Too Many Boards!,
by Harl Vincent. Published by Amazing Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Also, there appear to be specialized optos just for sharing news, placed in public places:
In the lower
levels of the great cities, the public squares were jammed
with horror-stricken humanity, waiting in vain for
definite assurance from the news announcers.
There is even a specialized optophone used in space ships:
Vincent uses this same word in his 1932 story Water-Bound Worlds:
He turned toward Zarko, but saw that he had engaged himself with the optophone. In the disc appeared the face of Kal Turjen, his usual cigaret dangling and eyes squinting through the smoke. The Martian was grinning cheerfully as he followed Zarko’s instructions in tuning the main radiophone transmitter. Kal was on the job in the radio room and was resigned to the situation.
Compare to the detailed article about the telephonoscope from Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century) (1882) by Albert Robida, the phonotelephote from In the Year 2889 (1889) by Jules Verne, the
telephot from Ralph 124c 41 + (1911) by Hugo Gernsback, the
video communicator from The Machine Stops (1909) by E.M. Forster, the
zoom call visaphone system from John Jones's Dollar (1915) by Harry Stephen Keeler, the
videophone from The Golden Girl of Munan (1928) by Harl Vincent and the opti-phone from The Impossible World (1939) by Eando Binder.
Efforts were made to keep the news of the disaster
from the public, but, as is usually the case, there was
a leak. Within a very few hours the public and private
news optos throughout the world blared forth the in-
credible tidings...
Captain Davis stood at the hyper-optophone in the
control room of his space ship.
Captain Boe stepped wearily to the optophone and flipped its lever. The alert but unsmiling visage of the Venerian chief engineer flashed into view on the disc...
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'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
