What do Commodore legend Chuck Peddle, New Jersey, Sri Lanka, WiFi, voice & video over IP via Skype have to do with each other? Well, friend and fellow reporter Evan Koblentz has a cool article about Chuck Peddle using Skype to save the day for a speaking engagement he was going to miss in New Jersey since he was stuck in Sri Lanka on business.With no Internet access in the event's auditorium, they leveraged WiFi and a connection to a neighbor's cable modem to enable Internet access. Evan points out that they had permission from the neighbor, but he just might want to check the cable provider's Terms of Service (ToS) on sharing Internet access with an adjoining building.
In any event, they held an hour videoconference using Skype which was beamed over the Internet from Sri Lanka to New Jersey to a cable modem to a WiFi router and finally projected to a 8 foot screen. They recorded the videoconference, which is hosted on Youtube, and which has some pretty cool computer history, including discussion of a 6 foot x 4 foot hard drive, Boolean logic, AND / OR gates, birth of microprocessors, and more. The Boolean logic & AND/OR gates bring back my computer engineering classes at UCONN. Chuck's first hard drive, which he helped design, was a whopping 6 ft x 4 ft and contained 5GB of hard drive space. It was accessed by pulling a coil on a motor. My, how far we have come!
Skype may not be worth $2.6 billion, but to the audience in New Jersey, the ability to view a computer legend via Skype was certainly priceless.
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