Congratulations Vermont Interactive Television. You have just turned 10! Not only that, but a host of celebs came to celebrate with you.

To hear Linda Anderson tell it, “Thank you—for staying with us!” She is the Site Coordinator of Waterbury and been with VIT since 1989 when the South Burlington site opened. Anderson has seen it all.

She laughs as she tells stories of the growing pains of VIT—from the coffee cups used by resourceful techs to cover the microphones to prevent feedback, to the images breaking up and reforming when the were switched from one site to another. (One woman asked them to cut the special effects.)

Back to the cups, they are most memorable for the time when one speaker used not the empty cup provided for the occasion, but upended her own cup of coffee to cover the mike.

In 1988 Vermont Technical College in Randolph Center was offering a Tech Communications course to Reach Up students in Newport as designated job retraining. Rather than send professors up to the Northeast Kingdom constantly, a new-fangled system called “closed circuit video-conferencing” was created with a site Newport. At that time, video conferencing was primitive. It was accomplished at the far end with one camera mounted on a tripod and two television monitors in the studio facing the students.

When a crisis occurred or an adjustment had to be made, the technicians interrupted the broadcast and stepped in front of the camera to talk to one another to correct the situation. Now, of course, corrections are easily made by computers in the control room.

The first official Site Coordinator was Phil DiMaggio, who worked out of his kitchen until “space” was found in the middle of a studio. He is lovingly referred to as “the oldest living site coordinator” by his coworkers.

Professor Tom Beyer of Middlebury College was commuting to the Randolph Center campus of VTC to teach Russian Culture to his students in Newport. After battling weather and distance, it occurred to him that a site in Middlebury was an excellent idea.

Some of the first sessions were UVM’s invasion of the pear thrips and Girl Scouts doing cookie training. The rate for system time was then $15 an hour.

The South Burlington site hosted a nursing course and as Site Coordinator, Anderson did much of the technical work. Because of technicalities, the course was shown over two local PEG (Public, Education, Government) cable access channels which anyone could watch instead of the normal closed circuit. And watch they did. The instructor was shown on channel 15, the students watching from Springfield were on channel 16. It didn’t take long for an audience to develop for the latest “soap”—the students staring at a monitor. It became a cult favorite with quite a following. VIT learned they had to handle this situation a bit differently when the instructor was shopping one day and a woman approached her asking how she could catheterize her husband at home.

At one point after the nursing course, Anderson overheard two women discussing someone’s symptoms and found herself muttering a diagnosis of a myocardial infarction. (She was right.)

In the beginning there were some interesting misconceptions to straighten out, as well as the current technology to surmount. People imagined that VIT was selling television sets. No.

Or that video conferencing went routinely out over regular cable or television stations. No. Only rarely.

Some people imagined their relatives could watch them at home on the living room set! Not.

As Anderson explains it, “Video conferencing has been around since the early 1950s. It was introduced to the general public in the Jetsons cartoons and in science fiction. In fact, it’s more like the telephone in the general store in the early 1900s. People come to our studios for classes. The technology is not in your living room—yet.”

When the South Burlington site was added, the programming increased considerably. By then so many “new” people were coming to use the studios that it necessitated an introduction to the studio and how the system worked. (Don’t forget the cups.) What seemed to the VIT crews as a “documentary length” orientation video tape was made telling the newcomers how to identify their site so the techs could switch to them (by saying, “This is Joe in Springfield”) and to warn them to wait a moment for the video switching to complete the mosaic breakup and regeneration of the signal (the infamous special effects) so that they could be heard by others. Years later, some of their veteran users still “ID” their site while on the air.

Site demos were done for anyone who would listen, including one women who wandered into the studio which was housed in the phone company and later admitted to coming in just to pay her phone bill. Sometimes the staff was corralled into clients programs. Anderson remembers the time she willingly dressed up as a pilgrim for one show. They encouraged clients to fax their agenda so the site would be ready—until one chap brought in 40 pages.

Their clients pushed the limits of reason too. Some of the crazy things done in the studios: making butter and cakes on Bunsen burners, exploding canisters to illustrate physics principles, dissecting frogs and cow udders, chain-sawing watermelons to show fractions, changing diapers and even machine guns were dismantled and rebuilt.

Over the years, as technology grew, so did VIT. From two sites to twelve, from Brattleboro and Bennington to Newport and Canaan and places in between. Their equipment kept pace. Instead of the five seconds of the de-and re-generating pictures of the past, the switches between sites are instant. The speakers don’t have to identify themselves so the techs can switch from one studio to the other and hope they match the speakers and studios correctly. Now, seven conferences can go on at once.

Congratulations! You’ve come a long way, baby.