Milpitas, California-based Dolch Computer Systems has launched a portable video teleconferencing system, the TelePAC. Dolch claims it is the first portable videoconferencing box that gives true plug and play capabilties because the screen has a Red-Blue-Green adaptor built into it, doing away with the need for an intermediary to drive the screen. Usually thin film transistor screens can work only with proprietary Video Graphics Array boards, but the TelePAC’s technology means that it can have up to eight slots that can take a variety of boards – AT, EISA, Video Electronics Standards Association and Perpheral Component Interconnect. The TelePAC is separate from the planned portable video teleconferencing product that Dolch and GTE Corp’s Chantilly, Virginia-b ased GTE Vantage Solutions announced in 1993 and which was supposed to have shipped last year (CI No 2,302). It was to have been based on Dolch’s Portable Add-in Computer family with proprietary technology from GTE, but has yet to see the light of day and might never do so; GTE sold Vantage Solutions to Ideas Commercial Systems Inc, also of Chantilly and a subsidiary of Ideas Inc, on July 1 last year to become Vanatage Technology Inc. But Ideas Inc’s Anapolis, Maryland-based Ideas has been working on a desktop videoconferencing system and this casts some doubt on whether the GTE-initiated project will be continued. However, Dolch says it believes the project is still alive. In Dolch’s TelePAC, the screen, which comes from Sharp Electronics Co, can display 16.7m colours. The system can have either 80486 or Pentium processors, and can be configured with two CPUs. It can also have a CD-ROM or a Winchester disk drive. Dolch describes the TelePAC as portable but luggable might be a better description – it weighs 14 lbs, is the size of a large box of breakfast cereal, and is mains-powered. But Dolch says its compact design, with in-built video camera, makes it ideal for a market it believes to be expanding. In fact, Dolch predicts all top executives will have video-conferencing capabilities on their desktop, hotel room and in the loo very shortly. The company has, in the past, been at the forefront of bringing to market high-powered, high-end portable computers. The TelePAC is available immediately in monochrome or colour versions and will cost ú3,300 and ú4,300 repectively.
