Answer: Macintosh users will need no additional hardware to receive video; all modern Macintoshes are able to display 4-bit (16 levels) greyscale. You'll need no additional hardware to receive audio; all modern Macintoshes are able to play sound. To send video you'll need a camera capable of sending 4-bit greyscale digitally, or a combination of a camera and plug-in board that results in 4-bit greyscale digital video signal. The currently-supported options are:

• the Connectix QuickCam

• the Radius VideoSpigot card (no longer being manufactured)

To communicate with others you'll need set up a working TCP/IP connection (a direct Ethernet connection, ISDN, or dial-up SLIP or PPP).

Answer: Windows users are well-acquainted with requiring additional hardware to receive video, receive audio, and play audio. A great video-in option is the Connectix QuickCam.

To communicate with others you'll need set up a working TCP/IP connection (a direct Ethernet connection, ISDN, or dial-up SLIP or PPP).

Answer: First read the rest of these web pages. If a problem is happening to you there's a good chance it's happened to someone else. Then subscribe to an appropriate email discussion list. Read the traffic for a while (day, week) until you feel comfortable that you understand the culture. When you write an email message to report a problem or request help, please include:

• Your operating system and version.

• Your hardware, operating system, and CU-SeeMe configuration. (Users of CU-SeeMe for Windows should include information about their TCP/IP stack and Winsock version.)

• A detailed description of all the steps you take to reproduce the problem, even if you think it's not important.

I include the following at the top of each problem report or request for assistance:

  Hardware: PowerPC Macintosh PowerBook 5300c/100, 8 mb RAM
  Software: MacOS 7.5.2, MacTCP 2.0.6, RAM Doubler 1.6.1
  Target:   CU-SeeMe version XX.XX.XX

(From sometime in late 1993) Cornell University's SeeMe (CU-SeeMe) has me more excited about being part of the global village than anything that's come before. The phrase "interactive desktop (laptop?) video-conferencing" doesn't do this medium justice -- the ability to see and hear fellow Internauts has made me acutely aware of the other people I share this planet with.

Over years of encountering the same people again and again (frequent contributors to the USENET newsgroups I read), I had in my mind's eye an image of them. Pleasantly unlike movies and television eroding the imagination honed by books and radio, I find that two-way video just adds to the feeling of kinship I'd built up with people I'd never before heard nor seen.

Much more than "Internet Relay Chat with video" (thank you Tom Nelson), CU-SeeMe has the potential for making amateur video the lingua franca of the future, much like ASCII was for the past. CU-SeeMe viewers have already seen live footage from the Olympic games in Lillehammer, Norway, and live Space Shuttle footage courtesy of NASA Select TV. I can hardly wait to see where we are a year from now.