In 1989. the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used its presence at an international computer visualization conference -- SIGGRAPH 1989 -- to paint a vision of distance bing eliminated by network and computing technology. The "Science by Satellite" demo resulted in this video to showcase early attempts at what today we call 'telepresence'. Specifically, NCSA's founding director Larry Smarr (now director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology) led the demo that linked conference rooms thousands of miles away in order to do real-time videoconferencing. At the time, this was only possible via satellite, but the NCSA video demonstrated how scientific collaboration could be done in the future -- using transmission over high-speed optical fiber networks. Calit2's Smarr is featured in several segments of this video. According to Sen. Al Gore, then-Chair of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, NCSA had demonstrated "what it might be like to have high-speed fiber-optic links between advanced computers in two different geographic locations." (less info)