Pause: LIP Service
Picture this: cablecasting live from your office. All you need is a camcorder and a new kind of cable box. In 1976 one gallery in uptown Manhattan and one downtown started cable-casting their own programs. But they did not have to taxi their tapes to the cable office. Instead, they broadcast them from their own offices. At that time every other home and office on the cable could only receive programs. These galleries could send them. They could even transmit live. Gallery hosts, for example, could solicit instant viewer response to their productions and take phone calls "on the air."
Techies of the time called sending a signal into the cable "injection." Sending a live signal was "live injection.'' These galleries, therefore, were two of only a few existing "Live Injection Points," LIPs for short. Interested in their potential, Manhattan Cable established a service for the promulgation of these LIPs. A company wag soon dubbed this, of course, LIP Service. Known as the LIP Services Director, this man was proud to give LIP service and get paid for it. He envisioned LIPs all over Manhattan talking to one another through the cable.
Seventeen years later, things haven't chan…
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