CU-SeeMe

» see cu-seeme.cornell.edu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The arithmetic never worked on my line. CU-SeeMe wanted a connection that could carry moving pictures, and the fastest thing in the house when I came online in 1998 was a modem measured in kilobits. The people this was built for sat on American university ethernet, where a live video window was a demonstration rather than a wish. I read about video over the internet for years before any of it arrived.

Tim Dorcey wrote it in the information technology department at Cornell, and it reached the public in April 1993 through an NSF-funded schools project called the Global Schoolhouse, which put classrooms in different countries in front of each other. What separated it from every other videoconferencing system of the period was the list of things it did not need. No codec card and no leased line. A network connection and a grayscale monitor were enough to receive.

The picture was a small gray rectangle that updated a few times a second. Everyone who used it says the same thing about that, which is that the smallness stopped mattering after about ten seconds. It was a live face arriving over a wire from somewhere else, and in 1994 nothing else on a desk did that.

A Windows version followed in 1994. Sound came in two stages, on the Macintosh that year and on Windows 95 in August 1995, using audio code taken from Maven, a separate project out of the University of Illinois. Before that it was silent film with a text box underneath.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the reflector ~

The client itself could only call one other client. Everything CU-SeeMe is remembered for ran on a second program called a reflector, which sat on a machine with a real connection and copied one incoming stream back out to everybody attached to it. A reflector with eight participants gave you eight little windows on your desk. That is the whole architecture of group video chat, worked out in 1993 by somebody who needed it to run over the connections that actually existed.

Reflectors were run by universities and by people with a spare workstation, so lists of them circulated and went stale constantly. Most were unmoderated. The unmoderated ones picked up the reputation that the unmoderated parts of every network pick up, and a fair amount of what got written about CU-SeeMe in the mid-nineties press was really about that.

~ what people pointed it at ~

NASA put shuttle mission feeds onto reflectors so that schools and science centers could watch them live, which in 1994 was not otherwise possible without a satellite dish. The Global Schoolhouse ran the other direction, connecting classrooms across the Atlantic so children could see each other while they talked.

Both uses share a shape. The value was never picture quality. It was that the picture existed at all and cost nothing beyond a connection somebody already had.

~ the two versions ~

For most of its life CU-SeeMe existed twice. Cornell kept releasing a free build while White Pine Software sold a commercial one, starting with the 2.x shareware line in 1995 and taking full commercial licensing rights in 1998. That was the year the free branch stopped: Cornell's last Windows build went out on 12 November 1998 and the last Mac OS 7 build on 30 December 1998.

White Pine then renamed itself CUseeMe Networks and merged into First Virtual Communications, and the product drifted upmarket into corporate conferencing, where it was competing against companies that sold hardware. The free grayscale window that had made the name was already gone.

~ bankruptcy court ~

First Virtual Communications and CUseeMe Networks filed Chapter 11 together on 20 January 2005 in the Northern District of California. On 15 March the court-supervised sale closed and Radvision took substantially all the assets for $7.15 million, of which $6.02 million was paid at closing and the rest held in escrow.

What Radvision wanted was Click to Meet, the enterprise platform. Radvision went to Avaya in 2012 and its technology unit to Spirent in 2014, each transfer moving the paperwork further from anything a schoolchild in 1994 had watched a shuttle launch on. The name that had carried the first video call millions of people ever made was a line item in an asset purchase agreement, and nobody brought it back.

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