The future used to be great. No traffic problems, because our cars would fly, no illness because science would solve everything, and no war, because a few bad guys would be killed, and then everybody else would just see the obvious wisdom of belonging to a global consumer democracy. And then, finally, Russians and Chinese could choose whichever toothpaste they wanted instead of being forced to stand in line to buy some horrible, chalky, government product. Probably wouldn’t even taste like candy! Commie bastards…

Sorry. Anyway, I didn’t know if, in the 21st century, we would be wearing fins on our shoulders or togas and lucite sandals, but I did know one thing: we would have video phones.

Back at Expo 67 in Montreal, when I was a wee lad, there was an exhibit of AT&T Picturephones. Not very impressive then, because, obviously, who were you going to call? Nobody we knew had one. We still had a black dial instrument, leased, as phones were then, from Ma Bell, the friendly, well-run, monopoly. My mother summed up the issues with this emerging technology thus: “What if someone calls before I have my makeup on?”

Video phones, like lost time travelers, have shown up in our quiet suburban home.

My daughter has the best computer in the house. I was going to give her one of my gently-used ThinkPads, but I didn’t want her to be embarrassed at school. She’s in a sorority, and I'm told they are very status-minded. So we got her a MacBook. That way her “sisters” won’t tear her heart out in a hideous secret ritual. I'm still working on an IBM ThinkPad T30, a fine machine, and with as much RAM and RPM and gigs and MHz as will fit, but still a lowly PC. Doesn’t even have USB 2.0.

Now she’s using Skype and the iSight built into her computer, and, lo, it’s a true video phone. She lies on her bed, in her characteristic teenage stupor, talking to her boyfriend. When I walked by the room, she turns the computer screen toward me and tells me to say hello. I wave at him, and he, in a parallel stupor on his parents’ couch in Denver, waves back. Very bizarre and wonderful. Particularly in its banality.

So, pathetically, I try to catch up. I may not have a cutting edge machine, but I'll be damned if I'll end up like my parents, whose technical expertise stopped at the telephone answering machine. I decide that I have to video phone her with my Thinkpad. Okay, it’s not a Macbook, and it doesn’t have a built-in camera. But it does have a 2.4ghz processor (which I installed, replacing the 1.6ghz chip it came with), and I have a Logitech Quick-Cam for Notebooks Pro. Should work.

Now, I’ve seen that commercial – the Mac vs PC one where they tape a camera to the head of the PC guy. And they’re right – the PC, all tricked out to do its stuff, is a spaghetti of cables and add-ons and workarounds. I have a PCMCIA card with USB 2 and firewire ports, and it gets power via a cable to my USB 1 port; my webcam is clipped to my monitor and plugged into my USB hub; and, natch, the whole mess is plugged into the wall. Very inelegant, crufty even, especially compared with my daughter’s sleek, white Macbook. But, amazingly, I called my her via Skype, just to see if my setup works, and, zowie, it does. Of course, she was in the next room, and the software introduced a one second delay, so thank goodness we didn’t have anything complicated to say. But it worked. And when I upgraded to the latest version of Skype, the delay dropped to a very acceptable tenth of a second.

So I guess I'm in the future now. Finally. Though I'm still waiting for the robot valet and the jet-pack.

Peter Basch