I first heard about Internet telephony back in 1985, when MIT professor Steven Burns told me about an "Etherphone" that some researchers at Xerox had created to send voice over a computer network. The system worked by taking a person's voice, digitizing it, breaking that digital data into packets, and finally sending those packets over a high-speed network. At the other end, another Etherphone reversed the whole process. Neat technology, I thought, but far too computationally intensive and wasteful of resources to ever be practical.

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