8x8 built chips to put your face on a phone call, a decade before anyone wanted one. The Silicon Valley company designed processors that squeezed video and audio down small enough to travel over ordinary phone lines. Its chips went into videophones and conference-room systems. When it went public in July 1997, 8x8 was a small semiconductor maker betting that people would want to see each other when they called.

Squeezing Video Through Narrow Pipes

Joe Parkinson and Chi-Ping Hsu founded the company in 1987. The bet was that compression was the key to sending rich media through narrow pipes. 8x8 designed chips and complete systems for video calling. It would change its business more than once. The first change came as the internet grew, when the company saw that voice and video calls could run over data networks as well as phone lines.

Close to Broke, Then Cloud

8x8 priced its offering at $6.50 a share in July 1997 and sold 4,140,000 shares. The stock rose in the boom and fell in the crash, when the company came close to running out of money. 8x8 remade itself as a service provider, selling internet phone service to small businesses. It grew into a cloud communications company. 8x8 remains publicly traded today, under the symbol EGHT.

Cover: The Chess Players, William Henry Fox Talbot. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for chess players (the 8x8 board).