Years ago at work we dismantled a classroom containing an early-to-mid 90s videoconferencing system from a company called VTEL. It was wild.

It was based on ISDN; two sites that wanted to videoconference had to call each other.

It used tons of proprietary hardware including a console with multiple video monitors (it was all NTSC based), multiple cameras around the room with pan-tilt-zoom ability, bigger TV monitors mounted on the walls and a MASSIVE 3-beam CRT projector on the ceiling.

I wish I'd thought to take photos of it all before we dismantled it but at the time we were rushed and I didn't think to. The whole thing was so massive and used so much hardware, all to do stuff a cellphone can do now.

Aha, found a photo of the classroom with some of the stuff still in it. You can see the huge 3-beam projector in the front, and the Sony monitors around the room.

I think we tried to use those monitors briefly but eventually scrapped them.

This photo is 20 years old. Damn.

By the way the name of this system was the VTEL MediaMax. Hit up a Google image search for that if you want to see what some of the components looked like.

The CODEC, or box that did the video encoding and decoding, was MASSIVE. (this is two of them)

I tried to get this stuff to boot before it went out to surplus, but none of it worked anymore. We didn't have room to store it and I couldn't take it home because of surplus procedures. So I didn't get to hack on it much. :(