I thought video conferencing would never work because futurists had predicted it for a century. People would hate it.
Posted via D.BuzzWe used to have webcams with a resolution of around 50k pixels, which limited the data traffic. I used mine to make vague selfies for dating chats (2003 here). 
I looked at the "video conferencing" section of that book. It was really only a couple of paragraphs. It said you need special software, and a camera, and bandwidth and the other person needs to have the same thing. Essentially, it said that it was possible, but I think very few people had that in 1999. Still, interesting.