Skype blogmaster Villu Arak’s entry on the AT&T Picturephone brought back memories for me.

Back in 1964, I trekked with my family from Chicago to the World’s Fair in New York. As a sarcastic teen, not much captured my imagination. But the Picturephone did. It's one of the few things, along with General Electric's "Progressland," I remember seeing while out at the Meadowlands.

I went with parents, my two brothers and sister into the AT&T pavilion, where we took our turn in an exhibit speaking on the video phone to family we didn’t know. I think they were at Disneyland.

It was exciting. It was cool. It seemed so futuristic and visionary: crossing a TV set with a phone. Wowser. Check it out the article and photos of the Picturephone.

Looking back, it also showed how screwed up AT&T's monopolistic vision was. As I recall, they did set up a trial to provide this service in select cities around the country. We regular people got to try it out at the World’s Fair talking to strangers. But AT&T saw this initially anyway as a business tool and people had to stop by AT&T offices and pay a left lung to use the service.

My friend Albert Dickens is fond of pointing out all the things he has heard of from World’s Fairs that never quite took off. “Where’s my flying car?” he asks me all the time.

The funny thing is the AT&T concept of the Picturephone actually came to be a mass phenomenon. Skype video calls, enabled by inexpensive webcams and the Internet, available from our offices and also our homes. That wasn't in the AT&T business plan.

AT&T also missed out on the free call idea. Monopolists are like that.