In the early 1980s, only a few could imagine internet voice calls or even face-to-face phone conversations with just a tap. The internet was far from being part of people’s lives. Most people were making phone calls through the traditional telephone system, and computers back then worked as an independent system of communication, used for separate technologies.
No one could imagine that one day it was going to become possible to call someone or to hold a conversation via the internet. Marian Croak saw that possibility in the technology much earlier. She joined Bell Labs, the research arm of AT&T, in 1982 and started believing that the internet would gain the ability to transmit voice messages, just as it was transmitting the data itself. Instead of using standard phone lines to communicate, Croak began to develop ways of transforming voice into digital signals sent through the internet. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, her work resulted in creating the technology of voice transmission through the internet (VoIP).
