VocalTec Internet Phone

In February 1995 the Israeli company VocalTec released Internet Phone, the first commercial program for making voice calls over the internet. Its founders, Alon Cohen and Lior Haramaty, had started working together while serving in the IDF and spent the late 1980s on computer audio: a sound card, and Hebrew text-to-speech that let blind people use a computer. In 1993 they released VocalChat for voice conversations over office networks, and then added the Internet Protocol. The heart of Internet Phone was their patented audio transceiver, whose dynamic jitter buffer smoothed over the delays, lost packets and reordering of internet traffic, so that two people with microphones and modems could talk across the world for the price of a connection.

The launch on 10 February 1995 was announced by a near full-page story in the Wall Street Journal. VocalTec went public on Nasdaq in 1996, and Deutsche Telekom bought a fifth of the company in 1997. The technology it pioneered, voice over IP, now carries internet calling everywhere, from Skype and WhatsApp to office phone systems.