AT&T.

Don Lancaster published an article in Popular Electronics (or RE?) back
in the 70's? on using LEDs as detectors. He mentioned that they could
be used exactly like you've described.

Shortly after the article was published, AT&T lawyers raided his home
with search warrants claiming
'industrial espionage' since they were working on bidirectional
communications at the same time, and his article made their patent app
'prior art'.
Lancaster was really pissed off about the harrassment, and wrote
a lengthy column about it. I believe he had a gag order when
he settled his lawsuit against them.

It's been a long time so I may have the name wrong but I'm fairly
certain about the company.

"Peter L. Peres" wrote:
>
> All this talk about reversible LEDs gave me an idea... See attached file.
> Now, who patented this before me ?
>
> Peter
>
>   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>                           Name: reverse-opto.pdf
>    reverse-opto.pdf       Type: Acrobat (APPLICATION/PDF)
>                       Encoding: BASE64
>                    Description: reverse-opto.pdf

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