The payphone of the future has been around for a long time.

While rummaging through old pictures in search of images for Tuesday’s Rockefeller Center’s “Communications” Portal story I turned up a set of photos I had no memory of taking: Payphones at LaGuardia airport in 2000.

Some of these were not just payphones, though. These were multi-purpose “Automated Business Centers” and “Cyberbooths” providing pay-as-you-go access to America Online, Compuserve, Internet E-mail, and other services still relatively novel (not to mention unnecessary) to all but seasoned business travelers.

TouchNet Business Services’ “TouchSurf Automated Business Center” provided access to Internet E-Mail, Fax Services, and the World Wide Web. The presence of a telephone handset appears to indicate that the TouchSurf also allowed ordinary telephone calls.

This page captured by Archive.org’s WayBack Machine in December, 1999, says that the TouchNet TN900 Kiosk was “designed as an automated teller who never sleeps, never takes a coffee break and is always pleasant during every transaction.”

Yay for pleasant!

TouchNet, based in Lenexa, Kansas, is still in business, but appears to have moved on from public kiosk products.

Nothing survives of ATCOM/INFO’s web site, but according to this 1996 press release captured by The Free Library the ATCOM/INFO Cyberbooth was the first public access Internet kiosk, a distinction which will never come up at pub trivia night but which should earn this defunct company a footnote in the appendices of communications history.

ATCOM/INFO appears to have disappeared but in its day it made a bit of a splash, getting written up in Forbes, the New York Times, and several travel publications. Forbes mentioned that ATCOM/INFO’s Cyberbooths could be found in “places as diverse as a truckstop in Ontario Calif., the Amtrak train station in Chicago, a shopping center in Hawaii, and the Champion Brewery in Seattle.”

This story from Hawaii’s Star-Bulletin shows a version of the Cyberbooth at the Ala Moana Shopping Center.

These pictures all came from a then-bleeding-edge Nikon Coolpix 900, a camera whose 1.3-Megapixel resolution did not capture images anywhere near as hyperclearly as today’s digital cameras. Thus it is impossible from this image to make out a name for the company responsible for this hideous “PHONE/FAX MODEM PORT” contraption, the hybrid public telephone device which I think is the ugliest of this series.

This machine’s phone number is displayed: (718) 289-1393.

The most enduring and successful hybrid public phone was the AT&T Public Phone 2000. As far as I know these devices were found exclusively at airports and in that context they were, relatively speaking, everywhere. Introduced in 1991 the Public Phone 2000 had a long and successful run offering pay-as-you-go access to web content, weather, travel assistance, and e-mail. The Public Phone 2000 also had a data port for connecting to a laptop computer.

The Public Phone 2000 was preceded by the Public Phone 1000, a device about which I can find little information and no pictures.

In October, 2000, the Public Phone 2000 was replaced by the Public Phone 2000i, an Internet-enabled deviced described by AT&T as “the Cadillac of all enhanced public terminals.”

These pictures are too fuzzy for me to distinguish a brand name or company responsible for this “PHONE FAX” contraption but the telephone number of this machine was (718) 289-1585.

A container attached held a stack of papers which read “FUN FAX POSTCARD VIA ACTION FAX PUBLIC FACSIMILE SERVICE“. These fax-ready pages bore an image a grim-looking cartoon man saying “Thought I’d FAX you while running thru NEW YORK.”

The “FUN FAX” trademark was owned by Hallmark Cards, the greeting cards giant which presumably made these sheets.

To be sure, numerous other devices like these stood at LaGuardia and other airports LARGE AND SMALL. I focused on these simply because I happened to grab pictures of them back in the salad days of hybrid public telephone devices. TSA gropings and other indignities have turned me off from air travel (and thus my visits to airports) but I would assume telephonic contraptions such as these still exist at many U.S. air terminals. Ranging in appearance from garish to what might have been considered cool for their day these devices performed valuable communications services before their usefulness was marginalized by smart phones and other Internet-connected devices.