Video Calling
American audiences got their first glimpse into video calling around 1982, when Blade Runner’s main character Rick Deckard hops onto a screen that reads “VID-PHON.” He proceeds to essentially Facetime, a concept that’s so common to our society now that rewatching the movie doesn’t make this scene stand out. At the time, however, video calling wasn’t commonplace. Audiences had no idea that video calling would be our main form of communication when the 2020 pandemic sent people into their homes for a year.
Way earlier, in 1918, a tech publication (yes, those existed at the time) called The Electrical Experimenter wrote of an even more realistic version of Facetime.
