Re: "Keeping in touch"
And there were Video phones on sales on the sixties.
Gotta call you on that. The only one I know of, was the well publicised and never really delivered Bell PicturePhone. https://ethw.org/Picturephone
Unless you had coax to the home in the 60s, all you were going to get was slow-scan TV, which is only slightly less annoying to watch than a fax machine. The bandwidth wasn't there, nor the compression technology, nor the processor power or memory. And the entrenched telephone infrastructure, while an admirably robust piece of engineering, was designed for voice calls, and (with a few high cost exceptions) voice calls alone.
The first really available (to the consumer) video calling was Skype in 2003 (I could never get CuSeeMe to work), put together by a Swede, a Dane and three Estonians as a hack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype
Biting the hand that feeds IT
