Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP)

It was an amazing era. The mid-90s was rife with internet innovation and one of the biggies was the condensation, dessication and then reconstitution of voice phone calls which were digitized, packetized, and then more or less "emailed" or rather, instant messaged any where the internet went. Elon Ganor, an Israeli entrepreneur, is credited as having been the initial progenitor of the commercial version of VOIP. In a historic call at a Wall Street banking convention, he initiated a phone call between Tel Aviv and New York which was a fully packetized VOIP call, getting around the hegemony of the existing telephone infrastructure of that era. The then-creaky technology has grown up a lot: When you make Skype calls, for example, you're most likely using VOIP to ask if the person on the other line is in fact, single.