BERKOM
BERKOM - Berliner Kommunikationssystem was a development project led by the Deutsche Bundespost to develop services and applications for planned broadband networks such as broadband ISDN , VBN , IBFN or ATM . It was founded as an organizational unit of Detecon on February 1, 1986 in Berlin .
Berkom was headed from the founding of Jürgen Kanzow until his death in September 1997. On January 1, 1993, the organizational unit was transferred from Detecon to the newly founded DeTeBerkom GmbH (later Deutsche Telekom Berkom GmbH), a 100% subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom based in Berlin. From mid-1999, the unit belonged to T-Nova Deutsche Telekom Innovationsgesellschaft mbH. With the transition from T-Nova to T-Systems , its independent existence ended.
Applications, multimedia (end) devices and services were developed and tested in the following areas:
- Teleservices (information services, telemedicine , telepublishing , networking of production facilities),
- Information services ("multimedia mail", video conferences , application sharing ),
- Knowledge management,
- Switching centers for broadband networks,
- Development of end devices,
- Development of transmission standards including the BERKOM reference model , a layer model for broadband services based on the ISO / OSI reference model .
BERKOM has used its own closed broadband fiber optic network in Berlin to connect the various project partners.
BERKOM carried out some projects that were far ahead of its time. In 1993 the TerraVision system was developed by ART + COM on behalf of BERKOM. In search of the most demanding, bandwidth-hungry applications for their VBN high-speed network in Berlin, BERKOM approached Art + Com. ART + COM presented the project called Terravision for the visualization of the earth to a broad public for the first time at the ITU conference in Kyoto at the end of 1994, and Terravision was used in Germany to present the future urban planning of Berlin. The system was installed at BERKOM and was demonstrated at a number of trade fairs. The project attracted attention not only because of the novel display, but also because of the form of navigation, which was carried out using an oversized trackball the size of a globe .
Terravision was implemented in Performer , an SGI graphics library, and must have piqued the interest of the then director and chief developer of the department responsible for SGI’s graphics libraries. A few years later Michael T. Jones founded the company Keyhole, which developed the technology and application, which in turn Google bought in 2004 and renamed Google Earth . Jones became CEO of Google Earth.
swell
- ^ Christian Wilk: World in hands . In: iX 12/2005, p. 50.
- ↑ http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/werke/terravision