I came across a post by John McArthur, head of Walden Technology Partners and a recent convert to Skype. What got my imagination going was his experience with Skype (paired with a Logitech webcam) that sparked memories of his visit to the New York World's Fair in 1964. That year, AT&T demonstrated its Picturephone, an effort to add faces to the voices in a phone conversation. The concept never took off and AT&T now calls it "big, expensive, and uncomfortably intrusive."

It will be interesting to see how internet video calls -- and related hardware -- evolve. But for a trip back to some old-skool visions of what video communication would look like, take a look at the Bell System Memorial website. Compare that to today's flat-design fetish and see if you can conjure up the form factor of video phones that will be gracing our desktops, walls and pockets in the not-so-distant future.