The PESTER, 1970: Earliest multimedia phone

Conceived at the beginning of the 70s by Euan McGhee and John Drummond, PESTER is thought to be the earliest known example of a multimedia phone. It contains a cassette player, camera and games as well as a phone.

The original premise of the PESTER was to allow businessmen to move outside of the office while staying in contact at any time. As it developed through prototyping, new features were added, and it became somewhat of a status symbol amongst the young and successful.

PESTER relied on a wired network using Connection Points positioned at convenient locations. These included parks, shopping centres and restaurants as well as regular sites along streets. These Connection Points allowed callers to access an operator who could let them communicate with landline users, fellow PESTER owners and also record and send vocal messages. ...

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Who invented the camera phone? It depends

The heartwarming story of how Borland founder Philippe Kahn invented the camera phone in a hospital room while his wife was having a baby is being put under the microscope by C/Net's editor, Michael Kanellos, who claims it's not quite accurate, and that Kahn was "not the first person to cross-breed the digital camera and the cell phone".

"This part is true, Kahn's wife did have a baby in January 1997 and Kahn did rig up all that stuff and post pictures to a Web site. The experiment eventually led to LightSurf, which he sold for $270 million to VeriSign in 2005.

But earlier, in 1994, Olympus released a camera called the Deltis VC-1100, which contained built-in functionality that let users upload digital photos over cellular and analog phone lines.

More details and a timeline of the technologies that followed...

Related: - Baby's arrival inspires birth of cellphone camera — and societal evolution